state of the web

state of the web

Does DuckDuckGo Want To Search the Web?

A relief from ancient Egypt in Bologna

Search engines have been losing the battle against content farms for a decade or so. Around 1 March I noticed that DuckDuckGo was including random things that it thought were physically close to my IP address in search results, things like maps, business directories, or local news stories that did not have most or any of the keywords but were things people might often click on. That made me look more into what DuckDuckGo actually is these days.

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2022 Year-Ender

a cleared section of concrete or asphalt with deep snow on either side. Something with cloven hooves has walked along the path and left prints in the blown snow
This path through the snow from the Salish Sea Blizzard of 2022 is not just for two-footed creatures!

The year 2022 is being escorted away by 200 soldiers and 70 horsemen and 200 ambidextrous soldiers so that the locals don’t do it an injury.[1] What on earth can I say about it?

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Google and the Culture of Searching

saying everything’s on the internet is great if you know how to use the internet. People who say it’s all on Google probably haven’t spent a lot of time watching people try to find what they want on Google. It’s challenging. There’s a lot of syntax to know, you’ve got know how to use a mouse, you’ve got to understand clicking, what’s a tab, what happens when I do this that and the other (thing), and there really isn’t a social institution dedicated to helping you figure it out. And then, that’s just for digitally divided folks, but for average folks who know how to use a computer, they still need to know how to be discerning about the information they get.

Jessamyn West, interview with Vermont Public Radio, 27 May 2016 https://medium.com/tilty/libraries-information-access-and-democracy-85e213086d22

“Don’t be evil” or not, Google has a great deal of power over Internet culture. One example is the way that Google discourages searchers from marking up their search (with quotes, Boolean logic, restrictions like “only from the following domain,” etc.) Google Advanced Search was removed first from their main page and then from their list of other Google tooks on google.com, and their algorithm takes more and more freedom to ignore quotes and deliver sites with only partial matches. Rather than encouraging users to become skilled searchers, it teaches them to type quickly and trust the algorithm.

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Google Pulls All Cornell University Library Videos

A "this page isn't available" scren for the YouTube channel of Cornell University Library
The status of Cornell University Library Channel as of 18 June c/o Dr. Alex Gill, Columbia University https://nitter.it/elotroalex/status/1538168994712399872#m

For about a week in June, Cornell University Library’s seven-year archive of videos were not viewable on YouTube. This was because they had posted an interview with the editors of pioneering lesbian magazine On Our Backs. You can find the details on Susie Bright’s new blog and check the status of their videos on Piped, a front-end for YouTube without the surveillance. Because they are a US institution with on the order of $10 billion in investments, and because censoring lesbian theory during pride month is a bad look, Cornell University was eventually able to have the channel restored. I just want to make one point.

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2021 Year-Ender

Victoria at sunset, fall 2021

Where now the blog and livejournal? Where the alert that was blowing?
Where are the drafts file and imagebank, and the wild words flowing?
Where is the strife about small wars, and the cathodes glowing?
Where is debate and discovery, and the archives growing?
They have passed like bits on a floppy, like tape in a dashboard
The sites have gone down one by one, by their owners abandoned.
Who shall turn the dry sheaves into green grass waving,
Or behold a sunken ship to the Sun returning?

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien B.A.

So, 2021 is crawling out the door under a hail of bullets, arrows, javelins, beer bottles, and hurlbats. A lot happened.

I worked the 2021 election where Canadians told their representatives to go back to work and not ask for absolute power, and I got a part-time job with a large Canadian retailer after three years of unemployment.

I got vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic.

I finished the manuscript of my second book and am about to sent a draft around to contacts with the right interests.

I published my first article in a language other than English (Spanish, with the magazine Desperta Ferro).

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Substack Transmits User Email Addresses in Plain Text

Apparently Substack encourages open discussion threads once a week or month. This has been a common way of encouraging engagement with ‘chatty’ blogs for at least a decade, whether they are hosted by Substack or Blogger or a local web host

At first I thought substack were just good self-promoters. They managed to convince people to lend them more than $80 million to launch a blog platform with 2010s aesthetics. Most blog platforms will deliver posts by RSS or email if you sign up, and paid and unpaid newsletters go back to the 19th century. Getting people with too much money to give you some is harmless, and convincing people to read and write blogs is good. But then @22@octodon.social suggested I should look at their source code and I saw something as beautiful as the tale of Emperor Norton of the United States.

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Building a Website to Last in the 2020s

The site above was last updated in 1997. It still does everything it was designed to do. How many script-heavy, CMS-based websites from 2017 will still be readable in 2041?

My mental health has recovered to the point that I can work on moving the static part of my website onto its own domain name and server. That is good, because WordPress’ web interface has become even more intolerable. Automattic has other frustrating policies, like storing images on their domain not mine (so if I move the site links on other sites to the images break), and editing a customer’s site to stop them from using someone’s legal and most famous name. If you want to see how a computer scientist[1] thinks about this problem, read on!

[1] a scientist with a diploma that says CSC and a resume with “junior software developer” under work experience, at least

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