Notes

I recently came across an article on Ars Technica that talks about how Google appears to be losing the fight against SEO spam. This is certainly a phenomenon I have noticed not only with Google but also with Bing and Duck Duck Go which is powered by Bing.

If you don’t know what “SEO spam” is, it’s essentially content whose only purpose is to rank high in search results so that people will click on the link and land on a specific website. While the page the user ends up on has to have at least some relevant content to their search query, it is most likely only a fairly useless lure to get them onto the website with the hope that they will click around.

It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.

[…]

Overall, the study found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.” Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam” and that there are “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.”

Ars Technica

The practice frustrates me because you search for something, then end up on some random company’s blog that sells shoes but is writing articles about the latest .NET framework or something entirely irrelevant to their actual business. It is simply a means of catching people not searching for shoes and getting them on their website.

Articles like that tend to be shallow, full of repetitious writing (which search engines seem to prefer due to keyword relevancy) and usually don’t contain the information I’m looking for. It’s basically a lose-lose for everyone since I then leave the website pronto.

Here is a link to the original article on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says

Microsoft’s new version of Outlook for Windows has seen its fair share of criticism and, frankly, rightfully so. It is a noticeable downgrade in many ways from the classic native application that has been with us since Outlook’s first release in 1997. The UI is more modern and it contains a bunch of new features such as better integration with iCloud and Google’s services, but as a web app rather than a native application, it is significantly slower and some really basic features are lacking.

The specific omission I wanted to mention is, frankly, shocking in 2024: the ability to add a username to an IMAP server. This is a basic, essential feature that has been around for decades and yet, the new Outlook doesn’t have it which just flabbergasts me. It may seem trivial, but it means that I can’t use it for my email because my web host requires a username that isn’t the email address. Outlook just assumes your email address is your username. Mail clients should never just assume anything because everyone’s setup and requirements are different.

Instead, I’ve adopted Thunderbird as my email client of choice for Windows. It is a native application and, more critically, includes the extremely basic feature of being able to add a username to an IMAP server. It isn’t the prettiest of applications, even with the fairly recent design refresh, but it is functional, reliable and usable.

I have sent feedback to Microsoft using Outlook’s built-in feedback tool, but unsurprisingly, nothing has happened. There are also already two threads about it on Microsoft’s forums from 2023 (thread 1 and thread 2), but again, nothing has changed. I’m not getting my hopes up anytime soon and honestly, I’m not even sure I want to use it as my main mail client on Windows. I just like playing around and it’s always disappointing when my fun is spoiled by such an embarrassing omission.

A little while ago, I stumbled upon an interesting project whose goal it is to emulate the Apple II DeskTop environment in the web browser. Emulation in browsers has been gaining traction in recent years as computers become powerful enough to run an entire operating system in a browser. Earlier this year, I wrote about a website that allows you to boot up almost every version of the classic Mac OS right from your browser.

I’m not incredibly familiar with the Apple II as I wasn’t around yet during its heyday, but I do know that for much of its life, its primary interface was a terminal. Eventually, Apple created a GUI desktop environment for it and you can certainly tell that both it and the Macintosh desktop environment shared a lot of the same UI principles. Anyone who has used a classic Mac OS desktop will feel right at home here.

So here are the links:

• The project’s homepage: https://www.a2desktop.com/
• The emulator: https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple//e?accelerator_toggle=true&gl_canvas=false&mono_screen=false#https://a2desktop.s3.amazonaws.com/lkg.2mg
• More information about the Apple II DeskTop: http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html
• And an open-source disassembly of it: https://github.com/a2stuff/a2d

There is a current trend I don’t understand in web design: websites that offer dark mode but bury it somewhere in their settings. As a web developer, I know it’s more work to offer, maintain and test both light and dark modes which, of course, translates to costs for companies operating websites with both modes. So why bury it?

As a user who has set my device to use dark mode, I have clearly stated my preference for it and since you already offer an automatic switch based on device settings, why not make this the default? Otherwise, it’s an absolutely horrendous user experience. I, as the user, may not even be aware that there is a dark mode option and even if I am, I have to navigate the menu system to go change it when I’ve already clearly told you through my device settings that I prefer dark mode.

Of course, not all websites are like that. This blog, for example, automatically switches based on the device settings which is really quite simple to implement.

So please respect my preference for dark mode. I have already told you I want to use it!

According to BNN Bloomberg, Google is now giving websites a choice: let us train our AI on your content or be delisted from search results.

Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content.

That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. 

Google’s dominance in search — which a federal court ruled last week is an illegal monopoly — is giving it a decisive advantage in the brewing AI wars, which search startups and publishers say is unfair as the industry takes shape. The dilemma is particularly acute for publishers, which face a choice between offering up their content for use by AI models that could make their sites obsolete and disappearing from Google search, a top source of traffic. 

Julia Love and Davey Alba

If this isn’t an abuse of power from its monopoly on search, then I clearly haven’t understood what that means. This puts publishers in a very difficult position: let Google train their AI on their content so that Google can show AI results in the search and make it unnecessary for users to click on websites to find what they’re looking for or not show up at all anymore in the search results. Either way, websites are going to lose.

News recently broke that Apple is forcing Patreon to pay its 30% App Store tax for every subscription done through its iOS app or get removed from the App Store. Essentially, this means that either subscribers or creators have to swallow the costs and I suspect most creators won’t be willing to sacrifice any of the little amount most of them earn from their creative work.

While I don’t have a Patreon account (anymore) and have never had a subscriber, I can imagine the frustration that most of these people are probably feeling. Heck, it frustrates me to no end even though I don’t rely on it for an income.

I suspect this won’t go well for Apple in the EU, as the App Store has already been designated a “gatekeeper” in the Digital Markets Act and Patreon already has the right to use or link to an alternative payment system, but elsewhere, like in the US, they are fully at Apple’s mercy.

I used to be a big Apple fan, but lately, I’ve started to lose interest in the company as it keeps acting in ways that rub me the wrong way. This is just the latest example. Unfortunately, the quality of their products is still better than most which makes switching to something else difficult for me. Windows has made major improvements over the years and I dabbled with Linux for a while too, but macOS is still my favorite OS and the quality of hardware is nearly impossible to find elsewhere.

In the smartphone and tablet market, the only real alternative is Android and since I dislike Google even more, so there is nowhere else to go.

In any case, I hope the anti-trust regulators have a heyday with this and Apple is forced to place nice.

Original announcement by Patreon: https://news.patreon.com/articles/understanding-apple-requirements-for-patreon

Last month, I was reading through the posts on one of my favorite nerdy blogs, OSnews, and came across something that interested me enough that I felt the need to share it on my own blog: most websites use dark patterns to manipulate their users to perform actions desirable for the website owner, but generally not for the user.

A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.

Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.

ICPEN

As I said, I originally read it on OSnews, so here is the link to the post there. I couldn’t agree more with what the author wrote about it there. Having to deal with cookie banners is annoying enough, but then having to click through a hundred different popups just to get to the actual content of the website is really off-putting.

In fact, I make it a point to never sign up for anything I have to close in order to access a website’s content. Want me to sign up for your newsletter? You’d better damn well not make me deal with it before I’ve had a chance to even see what your site has to offer. Want me to not block ads on your website? Maybe you’d be better off letting me see the content on your website first before I make that decision.

It’s frustrating and leads to the worst user experience you can have. Marketers and business people may not understand that, but it doesn’t take a lot of common sense to see why such dark patterns are so utterly obnoxious.

Sources

• https://www.osnews.com/story/140203/majority-of-websites-and-mobile-apps-use-dark-patterns/
• https://icpen.org/news/1360

I don’t often post memes or other images I find on the internet because I prefer original content. However, sometimes I stumble upon one that really just hits the nail on the head and this is one of them.

I love computers and programming, but I somehow hate them at the same time. Sometimes I really do wish I could retreat to a cabin in the woods and never have to use any computer or derivative (i.e. smartphone, table, etc) ever again.

For me, that’s usually a sign that I’m tired, burnt out, and ready for a break. At that point, it’s time to take a vacation and leave most of my technology at home. Afterward, I come back feeling refreshed and ready to dive into programming once again.

“Notes” is a new category on my blog where I am going to post small, interesting things I stumble upon. It might be links or images or tidbits of information. I really don’t know what all I will post here, but I have a ton of ideas and inspiration and feel like I need a spot to post small things without much comment.

And this is that place.

Is it really though?

There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this topic other than that PHP is still the stalwart of the internet. New languages come and go, get popular and fade, but PHP still remains dominant.

I used to use PHP for all of my personal projects, but have since moved on to TypeScript/Node.js for most the most part. That is primarily due to being able to share code between frontend frameworks such as React and the backend which makes maintainability and development much easier for a single developer.

I do, however, still maintain several WordPress websites that each have their own custom themes and/or plugins which I’ve programmed in PHP and it really isn’t all that bad.

As terrible as a lot of people find PHP, a language with that sort of staying power and robustness can’t be as bad as some people make it out to be. That might be a controversial statement for a lot of developers, but I would argue it wouldn’t be so widespread otherwise.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. This post really had no point other than to share the graphic.