Search engines
Bing stops accepting Sitemap pings, switch to IndexNow instead
Bing (and Yandex) no longer wants to be notified of updates to your website’s XML sitemap file anymore. Send the updated URLs directly with IndexNow API instead.
Search engines
Web Browsers
Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome
Google Chrome gives Google Search (when set as the default search engine) a network performance-boost over competing search engines.
Search engines
How to stop Bing ranking XML feeds over your webpages
Bing preferred XML and machine-readable file formats over human-readable ones in its search results. How link canonicalization helped rectify the situation.
Search engines
Yahoo!, AOL, OneSearch biased in favor of parent company’s websites
Verizon Media’s search engines promises “unbiased” search results, but serves results clearly favoring the company’s media websites over competitors.
Search engines
Use different search providers for every search with RandSearch
Set your web browser to search with RandSearch. It uses a random search engine to fulfill your searches. Get different perspectives, ideas, and results.
Search engines
Ctrl blog was unavailable in Bing Search for a month
Ctrl blog was nowhere to be found with Bing in September. I can only speculate on what I did to offend Bing. Link canonicalization may be to blame.
Open Standards
Firefox to reintroduce OpenSearch discovery and install in Firefox 61
Firefox removed the ability to add new search engines with OpenSearch when it removed the separate search field. It has now restored OpenSearch discovery support.
Open Standards
Robot discrimination: No robots allowed, except Googlebot
A survey shows how many websites discriminate against and block all search engines and spiders except GoogleBot in their /robots.txt files.
Open Standards
Explore some of the lesser-known robots.txt search directives
I’ve analyzed dozens of search engines and the robots.txt file of millions of websites. Here are my list of some of the more arcane robots.txt directives.
Search engines
Search with smiles :)
When a 🍔 isn’t a ‘hamburger.’ Search engines have problems understanding what we mean when searching with emojis characters.
Search engines
Location and date – targeting keywords hiding in plain sight
Stop losing search-engine referrals by forgetting to include blindingly obvious keywords like your business’ location and dates.
Search engines
Why is Google Search so popular across the European market?
I speculate on how Google Search won over the multilingual European market and came to dominate search across Europe.