Ctrl blog

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome

Google Chrome for Android gives Google Search (when set as the default search engine) a network performance-boost over competing search engines.

Bing preferred XML and machine-readable file formats over human-readable ones in its search results. How link canonicalization helped rectify the situation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 with smiles :)

When a 🍔 isn’t a ‘hamburger.’ Search engines have problems understanding what we mean when searching with emojis characters.

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.

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.