FEATURED  Google  November 20, 2023  Reading time: 7 Minute(s)

Max (RS editor)

Back in the 90's we proud Commodore Amiga Users used to make fun of other computer makers. In our opinion Apple was just selling not appealing units for rich people who had no idea what a real computer was. x86 machines were just laughable with their soundcards unable to perform anything but a blip, video cards limited to - I can't even remember - maybe 256 colors, and prices out of this world.

On the other hand, long before the music production software revolution started with Steinberg's VST technology, we Amiga users were already proudly composing and playing four tracks music masterpieces using both samples and MIDI, enjoying 4096 color palettes on our video games, and booting our machines in a couple of seconds from what can now be considered the ancestor of SSDs: Compact Flash cards running through the PCMCIA slot. It was 1992 and I was there.

While Mac gear was basically just invisible and useless at our eyes (by the way those which really wanted to feel the thrill of using MacOS, only had to install the proper emulation software and run it on their Amiga... little known fact: MacOS used to run faster on the Commodore machine!), Microsoft was our constant target for funny tech jokes. Of course one of the most important aspects in this regard was the BSOD, an acronym that for us was basically a synonym of Microsoft. Ok, I must to stop these Amarcord memories here. It was just to take a picture of what's in my DNA when I hear, even today, the word 'Microsoft', despite the fact I later became a Windows user.   

Now, going back to recent days, this article is titled 'Google vs Bing' for a reason. As soon as we went online with the Review Space site a month ago, we started to tweak a lot of SEO stuff and paid a mandatory visit to the Google Search Console and Page Speed Insights. You know Google knows its stuff, and given the positive experience I personally had over the years my opinion has always been positive about Big G. But not this time. 

While Review Space is starting slowly to gain attention, reaching almost forty thousand views in just a month from thousands of unique visitors - which is not bad considering that we are coming out of the blue with very limited resources - we experienced a not so very favorable and coherent treatment from Google. First of all, according to Google, our site - basically - is useless, being of "no interest" for the AdSense monetization. Ok that's not a problem, we can and will do it even without Google if necessary (I personally, and honestly, don't give a blank about it and have no problems to state it. I can make a living by selling AD spaces on my own and earn more than the few pennies Google thrown at its users and be happy with it).

Secondly, there are the problems encountered with indexing. After a month of struggling I can officially state that there's something wrong going on with Google. In one month their Search Console has been able to indexing just 6 pages of our site. Ok they don't like us, that's for sure (given also yesterday's partial block of my personal music related YouTube channel, that it could only be solved breaking GDPR European Laws with Google asking me a copy of my ID Card or a video of myself moving my head to see if I'm a real person, lol. Both operations can be performed only from your smartphone with Chrome, other browsers cannot do the job. And by the way I wonder how they can have any doubt on my identity since there are thematic elements of myself on YouTube created by the companies which manage my music, they already sent payments in the past years related to other projects of mine, and they basically own all my personal and reserved informations on their servers from decades, now) - I was saying they don't like us and me, and that their indexing, basically, it's broken... So we tried submitting several times our sitemap file. Now, we have a 'magic php thing' that create the sitemap.xml file on request; that's why I thought that could have been the problem when the 'couldn't fetch' error popped-up on Google Console. I personally disabled the sitemap 'php thing' and produced a real file physically hosted on the server. And then another, and another, and another validated sitemap.xml, but with no avail: the only thing I got is the 'couldn't fetch' error that, now, became quite annoying. 

To be totally honest some hours ago a news appeared about Google stating that they could have some problems with the Search Console (oh, really?). How they found it out? AI, you may think. Maybe one of the many skilled technicians on their ranks? Nope: it was thanks to users complaining by the thousands. There must surely have been an intercession from the bits & bytes' gods here, otherwise it would be impossible to understand how users managed to communicate with Google, which is practically an impossible task which, at best, leads you to communicate with a real human being who limits him/herself to copy and paste a piece of one of the many Google's regulations/tutorials texts via a "no-reply" email. 

Then there's the Page Speed Insights wonder, which promptly reports the slowdowns on your website and penalize your SEO score, intelligently, after that, coming to the conclusion that the bottleneck problems are caused... by Google's own scripts! Here the levels of irony are in the realm of standup comedy. 

So in my recent personal experience Google isn't doing well at all. But what does Bing have to do with it, then? Well, I just went to Bing.com - which I don't normally do (see the introduction to this article...) - and searched for "Review Space info": the first result is our X page @ReviewSpaceInfo, followed by the second and third results both linking back to our site with quantum precision. What we have done to accomplish the magic, you may wonder? Nothing. Microsoft Bing do it all by itself, and this speak volume about the searching capabilities of Bing compared to those of Google which, basically, is unable to find a site even if you gave all the necessary coordinates by submitting it through their "search console".

At the same time, after a month of struggling, the only thing I can see on Google is the result related to our X profile, which popped-up amongst search results just today, very likely thanks to X indexing rather than Google efficiency.

All in all I honestly think that there are clear signs of decadence on the Google side, and not limited to their search department. As a YouTube and Google ecosystem user for decades now, I can see it all over the place.

On the other side Microsoft is moving in the right directions 360 degrees (very likely 365, knowing the guys) and the clever move of today, with Altman and Brockman joining its AI team, it is just an example but also a confirmation on this regard.

Not only Microsoft has made huge strides on the search compartment (which actually means the ability to collect information, a lot, and in the shorter possible time), undoubtedly thanks also to their proprietary AI technology - this alone says a lot also about who's heading the AI challenge that soon will turn openly into a race for the podium's first place - but it is easily predictable that in the near future, if this trend will continue, Microsoft will easily outperform Google that, in the meantime, is facing big problems even to read a sitemap.xml file.

It's an 'Amiga Rulez' user who tells you, if you don't want to believe it and consider this article just a rant it's ok, but you can at least appreciate the intellectual honesty in positively evaluating Bill Gates' creature.

(Cover image by viarprodesign on Freepik/Review Space | Amiga 500 image by Commodore | Droid image by trumanbrown on DeviantArt)