Th3 Core

When I get bored I browse through the comment spam on my WP blog.  It quite amusing.

So remember the old "Submit your URL to 1500 search engines" spam we used to get by email?  Well recently I got comment spammed to "Submit your URL to 2500 search engines".  1. Here +20 years later and with Google as the only search engine this spammy pitch is still making the rounds, 2. the alleged number of search engines is now at 2500 so we have search engine inflation.

It was interesting seeing this old old spam still making a rare appearance as a blast from the past.  Some others like time shares seem to have completely died out.

Brave: Sharp increase in installs after iOS DMA update in EU

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/brave-sharp-increase-in-installs-after-ios-dma-update-in-eu/

"Maybe that's why Google still hasn't implemented a browser choice screen on Android."

Bludit  -  https://www.bludit.com 

Create your own Website or Blog in seconds.  Simple, Fast, Secure, Flat-File CMS


It looks pretty complete.

Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/28/24053882/arc-search-browser-web-app-ios

Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company’s big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren’t different things. They’re all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.

At least they are thinking outside of the box.

If you are a small smartphone company, getting your phones accepted for use on one of the three Big Telecom Mobile networks is difficult.  It's a barrier to selling phones and makes it real hard to enter the US market.

Murena is the smartphone brand owned by non-profit e.foundation which produces their own fork of Android with all the Google spyware  removed.

So anyway "Murena" has started their own brand of MVNO network based on T-Mobile USA.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/23/murena-android-google-mvno-mobile-plans/

https://murena.com/america/murena-mobile/

I'm already on T-Mobile and my phone (Fairphone 4) works just fine so I'm unlikely to switch, but this tells me that /e/ foundation and Murena are serious about the US market which brings the fight against Google spying right to Google's heartland.

There is some precedent for this: the Librum 5 Linux phone by Purism started offering their own MVNO and I assume this was mainly because they had problems with US mobile carriers.

Fair warning: this is a long long article, but I found it very interesting.

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

Added:

It may be long but it's nice to see a serious and detailed take on this subject and not just a clickbait list you can read in 1 minute and is a really just a rehash of 20 other clickbait lists of search engines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-and-other-gear-will-reportedly-switch-away-from-android/

Amazon has been working on an in-house replacement for its Android-based Fire OS, codenamed "Vega" and built for easier app development, according to reporting from Janko Roettgers at Lowpass.

This is all new to me.

Speculation:  This might bring Amazon back into the phone market if the tablet and smart TV versions are successful.  In any event it's good positioning for Amazon no matter which way the US vs. Google anti-trust trial goes in re. Android.