Google
Has Google been a monopoly? Close. It's not that Google stores data about who searches for what; knowing that people who search for "Supremes music videos" also search for "Shirelles music videos" does nobody any harm. (Of course, if your searches betrayed any great interest in disgustng diseases, illegal drugs, possible arguments for defense if convicted of public indecency, etc., you probably had enough sense to do them on a public-access computer while not logged in to any Google account you had.)
No, but it's the way Google has been handling searches lately that annoys the daylights out of people who were paying attention. At first you could type in a single search term and actually get only a handful of results. I forget whether it was Google or Ask Jeeves that once yielded four online mentions of "Zambia" around the turn of the century. Then the Internet filled up with content, and clients paid for content that was "search engine optimized" according to various rules, and finally Google was in a position to use a site owner's credentials as a major determinant of what shows up at the top of a Google search.
So far, so good. But then the site owners got greedy. "Force traffic to the top of the search," they demanded. "Make it harder to scroll down through all 50,000 results. Don't show people all 50,000 results! The top hundred should be good enough!"
As I've been doing those updated moth articles, I've been greatly annoyed by this. For better or for worse, an article I wrote more than ten years ago, listing all 23 of the species of Hemileuca I found online at that time, mentioning that although web pages had been set up for some of those species they'd never been filled in with any information, really was one of the most informative articles on the Hemileucas at that time. It's still in the top 100 search results for some of those moths. Which, when you consider that the algorithm that originally put it in the top 100 apparently counted how many different ways the word Hemileuca was used in sentences, and that what I had to say, at the time, about Hemileuca dyari was that no information about it was available, is pathetic. Because, as I go back and research these moths on todays more informative Internet, much more information is out there. There've actually been over 70 species names in the genus Hemileuca; several have been lumped together as subspecies or mere local variations, and now, of course, Tuskes and Collins have explained why DNA studies make a case for counting only six distinct species of Hemileuca. And one of those six looked similar enough to another that nobody even bothered to mention it as a subspecies, fifteen years ago. And now there are live photos of H. dyari, and H. lares, and so on. But the new algorithm blocks personal blogs from the top 100, so Google is still steering traffic to an old outdated article and refusing to direct any of that traffic to any of the much better ones I've been able to write since then.
Meanwhile, where a search for Hemileuca diana pulled up about a dozen search results Back Then, it pulls up thousands of results now. Some of those results are garbage. Desperate junk sale sites often stuff their home pages with random keywords, suggesting that nobody at the site actually reads English, in hopes of attracting a few looks at what they're selling, which is likely to be "looks just like louis vuitton bags/" Those are easy to spot. Then there are the sites that sell arts'n'crafts with motifs inspired by nature--any time you Google a moth, butterfly, flower, even a snail species, you're likely to get results for moth-motif fabrics or stick-on tattoos or not-trying-so-hard-to-look-like-Louis-Vuitton handbags. Those are also easy to spot. Although the Hemileucas are reasonably showy moths, some beautifully subtle and some psychedelically gaudy, searches for them don't yield as many sites tryng to sell dead bodies as searches for butterflies do. But I am interested in reading, citing, and linking to pop culture phenomena like someone's having composed a long instrumental piece dedicated to a butterfly species, or someone's blog post about having found a moth resting on a window screen. I do not want to be limited to some tiny fraction of what's out there. That is not making the search results better.
So, what else is out there? Yahoo has often offered more search results than Google. Bing usually offers less, and although I never asked Google or Yahoo to pay me for searching, it also annoyed me that Bing used to promise to pay people for searching and then conveniently lose their account data when the time came to pay up. Bing should sink in a pit. I've seen no evidence that Yahoo can be forgiven for destroying their regular users' free e-mail accounts in an utterly insane fantasy that that would motivate anyone to pay for e-mail--the attraction of e-mail is that it's free of charge, funded by ads--but I have to admit Yahoo search results did a lot for some of the moth and butterfly articles at this web site.
Then there's that list of browsers that promise that they don't filter results, don't collect data, etc. I personally don't give a flip about Google collecting my data. I do nothing online that needs to be hidden; I search for data about things I'm writing about, and I search for the lyrics to music videos friends post if I want to sing along, and that's just about all of it. The newspapers would be welcome to publish it if they'd pay me. (LOL.) But, do the allegedly uncensored browsers show more photocopies of crumbling library books, more private blogs and poems, more unexpected gems like Sargent's links of butterflies to goddess archetypes? Hah. They don't censor because they "search" Google. They consistently yield not even Google's top 100 search results, but more like Google's top 50.
I've complained about this to Google. If there are 50,000 results, show me 50,000 search results, I've said. Result? Google has stopped displaying the total number of search results. Google still does a little digital slap in the researcher's face where they say that they've omitted some results as being repetitious, although their Top 100 results usually include at least five duplications of at least five pages, and "If you like you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." Which then yields an abridged, not expanded, version of the results they showed the first time.
That's the kind of hubris that gets companies declared monopolistic in court.
So long as there is effectively no way to search beyond Google's top 100 or Yahoo's top 500 results, and now that many topics yield more than 50,000 results, a lot of relevant content--e.g. the more authoritative, better researched, more up-to-date articles that Google refuses to allow to replace that long-ago study of 23 Hemileuca species--is effctively being suppressed, never to be discovered by people who may be looking for it. And I know firsthand that that content is NOT being suppressed because it was published by neurotics who don't want strangers reading what they've published, or because it's a mess of random English words stuffed into the home page of a junk sale site, but because the people doing the newer research and better informed writing are not PAYING TO BE in that top 100 search results from companies that have paid Google to "FORCE" traffic to them.
(Not that I seriously think the efforts to "FORCE traffic" are being made by INaturalist. I think INaturalist, Funet, and other natural science sites are perhaps having their numbers inflated by algorithms demanded by "celebrity" and "latest trends" sale sites. But the legitimate science sites need to demand that the search engines stop suppressing unpaid content from search results.)
I'd like to see Google survive this, and the first step in their survival strategy should be to announce that they're aware that suppressng search results has been harmful and that they will never, never, never suppress all 500,000 search results, if anybody is really willing to search all the way through 500,000 results. Taking payment for putting sponsored links in the top 100 is no crime, and should only ever hurt the sites that make such payments, so long as researchers have full access to the other 400, or 900, or 499,000, or however many sites we are willing to read.
Politicians Who Don't Have Enough Sense to Be Very Nice to Bloggers
Do not have enough sense to live, as pollies. Are not viable. But Mean Girl McDowdypants does prove that it wasn't Joe Biden's age, as such. She can sound as incompetent, if not more so, and she's not even all of sixty years old yet. Video documentation:
Senator Kaine played by the rules and was nice to this web site, so we're nice to him. Dowdypants thinks she can get away with anything'cos she's going to censor the Internet, hahaha, wahahaha, yeehahaha, careful she doesn't fall off the chair--how many alcoholic drinks has she had so far today?! I want to see D voters recognize that Robert Kennedy caaaares about their precious handouts, the only thing most of them have voted D for since the Carter Administration. Make it happen, Gentle Readers. I want to see Dowdypants lose with a vote count last seen in a year when we had only fifteen States.
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