The Core

If what the author says is true, first Raghavan screwed up Yahoo search and now he's screwing up Google search.

Not that I care:  I hope Google stays in it's death spiral and augers in.  It's better for the Web if we don't have monopolies.

I keep listening to this show and finding amazing marketing facts like:

Search engines (read Google) had a better handle on who would win the 2016 presidential elections than the political surveyors.  The search engines knew that in searches, people tended to put their favored candidates name first in a query ie. Clinton vs Trump debate.  Of course they also knew where the searcher was from and a ton of other tracking info on the searcher.

That was 2024: Ep. 22 Pants on Fire: When Customers Lie to Marketers

Also in that episode:  Walmart has learned that when a weather disaster is approaching people tend to stock up on Strawberry Pop-Tarts.  So when a hurricane is on it's way, Walmart ships in extra Pop-Tarts and particularly strawberry ones to local stores in the path.  Nobody knows why strawberry.

Today's Ep. 23: Ham on Wry: Sandwich Board Advertising: talked about how advertising took off in the 19th century in London.  Soon every surface was plastered with bills and signs that it got out of control.  So the government put a tax on advertising which brought things under control - sorta.   I kinda like the idea of taxing advertising.

Repeating it: I really love this show.  You should try it.

That was well written.  And, yeah, we've talked about this many times before, so just yeah.

My problem with Kagi has always been with privacy.  If you have to register, login, and give them your credit card info, your searches are not private.

I thought I'd never say this, but I agree with Texas on this.  There is a demand for small ICE trucks and if US manufacturers are not going to build them then we should be allowed to import them.  And frankly, it doesn't have to just be Kei trucks, I'd love to be able to buy a new Chevy S-10 or a, small not midsized, Ford Ranger with a modest 4 cylinder engine.  Remember those?

This whole business of everything having to be a giant monster and cost a fortune is BS.

>Kagi is built using Google data

Kagi is currently using Brave search, Yandex and Mojeek for their primary meta results and Marginalia plus their own Telcis (Sp?) for their "Small web" search.  Somehow Brave search has reverse engineered their index and ranking by copying Google.  Nobody seems sure of the details about how Brave has done this and nobody has ever spotted a user agent identifying itself as being from Brave search.  So there is some sort of connection Google but sort of murky and IMHO dodgy.

I have not tried it, but people seem to like Kagi, which shows you can build a decent meta-search engine with Brave, Yandex and Mojeek.  Also my traffic from Kagi has gone up (but not to commercial levels) since Kagi went to these sources.

It's spreading.

Myanmar's military-ruled capital attacked by drones

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68730993