Google once-upon-a-time claimed it would abide by the dictum, Don’t Be Evil – riffing off the Dr. Evil character played by Mike Meyers in the Austin Powers movies.
It might try not being dishonest, as a start.
I just got a “report” from Google Analytics (sic) which tells me this web site had 32.1k visitors in January. This is a lie, which can be proved by referencing the fact that just one article – First, They Lied About the Range – that was published on this site last month (January 27th) received 34,303 “visits” – and that was last time I checked, a few days ago.
Unless all of the other articles published on the site last month – which amounts to something on the order of 30 of them, as I usually publish at least one new article every day, each day of ever month – had zero “visits,” then the math – as the saying goes – doesn’t add up.
So I decided to do some re-figuring. The five “political” columns posted during the final five days days of January – from the 27th to the 31st – all by themselves account for 10,593 “visits.” This encompasses the following articles: Electric Wave Cresting (2,039 “visits”), Sound Police (1,752 “visits”), When Gas Mileage Mattered (1,875 “visits”), It’s a Riot (1,790 “visits”) Toyota Transitions (2,080 “visits”) and The Problem with Policing (1,058 “visits”). During the same time period, there were also several additional articles published, including car reviews and features, along with a couple of radio spots. These account for several thousand more “visits” during the same five days.
Thus, the total – for the last five days of the month is in the neighborhood of 15,000 “visits.” This is typical – average – for a five-day period. On that basis, this site had at least 60,000 “visits” in January. Not counting the 34,300 additional “visits” that one article – which attracted a lot-more-than-usual “visits” because it got picked up by several other sites that have even more “visitors” than this one has.
Thus, the total count for January is close to 100,000 “visits.”
But Google doesn’t count some 70,000 of them apparently. Probably because if Google did, it might have to pay for them.
This site does still have some embedded Google ads – hence the “reports” from Google Analytics. These are a legacy from long-ago, when the site was launched way back in the Jurassic Era of the Internet, back in the early 2000s. Thank the Motor Gods, the survival of this site does not depend upon ad revenue from Google, which is akin to the crumbs Stalin tossed at the feet of the chicken he’d just plucked.
Google pioneered the screw-the-publisher model of Internet advertising, which replaced the practice of paying a publisher “X” dollars per month (or issue, if we go back to the print media days) for the space used to advertise whatever it was they wanted to sell, with an utterly opaque “click” or “views” model. This enabled them to cut their advertising costs by probably 99 percent – increasing their profits by a like amount, while leaving the 1 percent on the floor, for the publisher to peck at like Stalin’s chicken. 
This makes it almost impossible to support a publisher’s ability to publish. And it does something else, too. Google sends insolent “violation” notices to publishers, threatening to cut off the 1 percent left on the floor for the “chicken” to peck at, if the publisher does not remove the offending material. Which is considered in “violation” without any definition – beyond it being in “violation.”
But we all know what is meant by “violation.” It is anything Google does not like. Which is often synonymous with the truth and the facts (as Clover, this site’s mascot, used to like to say). Usually, this exerts the desired editorial control over the publisher whose dependence on the scratch left on the floor for him to peck at is the tool used against him.
Thankfully, Google-Stalin has no such power here. Chiefly because of the people here, who support the site and so keep it independent of being dependent upon Google-Stalin.
And in a position to expose its lies.
. . .
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Serious questioning- if they are paying based on views or clicks, and they are demonstrably not counting views or clicks, how is this not fraud? Leaving aside the question of censorship, how is this not fraud upon their customers?
Google (goolag) lies, you don’t say, lol. Like Facebook (called faceberg) and Youtube (called jewtube) because they are ALL Israeli intelligence operations:
If you want to call them zionists go ahead and fool yourself, they are all tribal jews, all of them working together, and they control the content of all the social platforms, which is why when Elon took over Twitter they were in an uproar, as their complete monopoly was busted. Elon says he bought a crime scene. Yes he did, a Zionist apparatus controlling Amerikan elections.
https://i.imgur.com/q5sPFxq.jpg
23 and me CEO Anne Wojsicki is the sister of Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and is married to Google CEO Sergie Brin. 23 and Me was busted collected genetic data for Israeli bioweapons program.
Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Israeli data collection on that popular social media platform, and only a damn fool, would go on it and give away their personal data to the tribe that wants to kill them. Facebook wants us all to become Borg and merge into the metaverse. Facebook would ask, what is the name of that person in that photo you posted. Yep. Intelligence work.
Did you know all NSA data is first sent to Israel?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents
And what about that Pfizer CEO creep Albert Bourla, who is a vaxx mass murderer? Another celebrated Jew, getting the highest rewards in Israel, and from the ADL. And why isn’t Bourla in prison, here is why:
https://i.imgur.com/rnmnzP7.jpg
Yukon Jack,
(((They))) are actually much worse than what you portray…
And all your information is correct, but it doesn’t cover the history of they WHY are (((they))) this way…this link does show who the real perpetrators are, and a little of the history involved….
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2022/03/10/the-hidden-history-of-the-incredibly-evil-khazarian-mafia/
And Kudos to Eric, for shining a light on the Evil that (((They))) do, daily, all over the world.
Frau Farbissina says Google is lies, all lies!
Remember the days when people would embed every swear word, especially porn-related or just vulgar, into the HTML code of pages and they’d get astronomical hits?
Hi Eric, in web analytics reports, a “visitor” can account for multiple “visits” to a website within a given slice of time. So if I, as a repeat visitor, visit your website 3 times in January, I’ll account for 3 visits and 1 visitor that month.
“Don’t be evil” morphed into “We are evil”.
What’s NOSTR?
It’s short for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.” It’s officially described as “a decentralized network built on cryptographic keypairs that is not peer-to-peer.” None of that soup of words does much to describe NOSTR, and the concept may take some time to sink in for those used to traditional social media.
However, once you do, NOSTR’s potential is obvious.
It is not a platform. It doesn’t have a server, a fancy glass office building full of nerds playing ping-pong and bingeing on free chai lattes, slick marketers, or even a CEO. You don’t really sign up for a NOSTR account and don’t look for a NOSTR app because there isn’t one available in the stores.
NOSTR is a protocol, or more precisely, a decentralized base-level protocol, that allows anyone to build nearly whatever they like, including a chat room, a social media platform, an interactive game, and a news site.
A developer by the name of fiatjaf designed and coded NOSTR in 2020 as a discrete, open-source, niche substitute for both Twitter and Mastodon. NOSTR is powered and distributed through decentralized platforms and apps, or “clients,” in contrast to conventional social media.
There is a top-to-bottom movement that favors decentralization.
Geopolitically, this happens through the realignment of allegiances and partnerships of nations. Individuals, on the other hand, need to figure out how to keep their money, savings, and voices out of the reach of governments, bureaucrats, and technocrats.
Nobody is pleased with the scramble for power that’s taking place everywhere, and decentralizing technology may offer the common person a way out of the rat cage.
As big tech and legacy media collude with governments to control the narratives and censor dissent, people are searching for alternative locations and social media platforms where they can exchange and propagate ideas and their creations without running the risk of being de-platformed, censored, or canceled without much in the way of appeal.
Against this background comes NOSTR.
Although the mainstream media hasn’t yet taken notice of NOSTR by large, it’s been making the rounds in the digital underworld for some time and beginning to surface and gain some traction. The final push was given by none other than Twitter by adding NOSTR to the list of items/services forbidden from being advertised on its platform. All this did was put NOSTR square in the spotlight.
After everything that transpired with COVID, lockdowns, vaccines, and everything else during the previous two years or so, what better way to put something squarely in the spotlight than to make it verboten?
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/how-nostr-will-change-world-privacy
“The search engine that doesn’t know anything about you” based in Europe and seems pretty good and as a plus doesn’t parrot the approved line and gives you a more international perspective.
https://www.qwant.com/?home=daily
Thanks for this, David – I plan to check it out later this morning.
The psychopaths at the WEF want to have the ability to hack our brains…….
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wef-wants-hack-your-brain
google alternates
https://spreadprivacy.com/how-to-remove-google/
Google Analytics alternatives… → Fathom (paid), Simple Analytics (paid), Plausible (paid, or free if self-hosted)
If you run a website that uses Google Analytics, you’re letting Google collect data on every visitor, which they can then tie to data collected from millions of other websites. Switching to Fathom, Simple Analytics, or Plausible will still give you visibility into how visitors are using your website, but you’ll also be respecting their right to privacy. These services state on their websites (as of the time of this writing) that they are GDPR-compliant by default, do not use cookies and therefore don’t require those annoying cookie agreement popups. Plausible also has a free self-hosted option.
Google had the motto “Don’t be evil”. With their actions the past few years however, their motto may as well be “Don’t go against Big Brother.”
There is an easy solution.
Repeal Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act.
Require ALL social media sites with a market share of over 10% to be reclassified as “common carriers”, not unlike the telephone companies.
Immunize social media sites from lawsuits regarding user content.
When was the last time a telephone company censored users?
Back when the public Internet was getting going, there was a lot of speculation as to how everyone would react with communcations too cheap to meter. The big idea was that newspapers would be able to eliminate subscription fees because most of that went to pay for distrubution, not content. The biggest revenue source for newspapers was the classified ads.
eBay and Craigslist destroyed classified advertising departments. At the same time, ad agencies and buyers were discovering doubleclick.net, an online auction for banner ads and links. With doubleclick’s keyword model it was easy to place ads, at a price that only automation could provide, and it was an international one stop shop. After Google aquired doubleclick it merged the search engine and ad auction and the rest is history.
Now newspapers have to use Google adsense to place buys. They got back some of the lost revenue, but Google controls who sees your page. Even if Google is benign and only interested in money, the advertisers aren’t going to place buys on fringe pages. And editorial is going to try to produce the best search hit, not create the best story. Instead of empowering the readers or creators, it instead empowers advertisers.
Google shares are down 8.5% at late morning, on ‘concerns that its new artificial intelligence chatbot Bard may yield inaccurate responses.’
What a laugh: I have concerns that every single Google search, every day, is tainted by behind-the-scenes censorship and deliberate skewing of results.
But hey … anything that serves to kick Evil Google to the curb is cool with me.
Let ten thousand layoffs bloom! 🙂
ChatGPT produces text that reads like you’re talking to a five year old child. Most of the “answer” is made up whole cloth, and when you respond negatively it will double down. Great fun when asking a child about God or how electricity works, but kind of worthless if you want to learn anything.
Very interesting take. I have absolutely zero interest in chatting with that thing, and I don’t understand the need. The AI is working in the background on Google and Microsoft msn and BING search engines. They serve to censor viewpoints and speech that differs from the mainstream narrative. It is okay to say that you wouldn’t mind seeing Trump dead, for instance, but if you say the exact thing in the exact same way about Democrat politicians, you get a ‘community standards” flag. It’s unreal. Back to AI, it’s everywhere.
Last month, the US fedgov filed an antitrust action against Evil Google:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
What ‘equitable relief on behalf of the American public’ might look like is unclear.
Number one on my list would be obliging Evil Google to divest YouTube, which it bought in 2006 under the George W Shrub administration.
Evil YouTube spawned competitors such as Rumble (which also is suing Google), thanks to Google’s heavy-handed Woke censorship imposed by leftist Commiefornicators.
Like John Kable, I strive for a Google-free life. Just ditched muh Android phone, which sucked anyway.
Jim,
“What ‘equitable relief on behalf of the American public’ might look like is unclear.”
Let me clear it up for you. It won’t amount to squat on Google’s balance sheet.
Jim H. A lot of times, lawsuits are used to bypass restrictions on enforcement agencies, or regulatory agencies. Not sure what is behind the lawsuit against Google, but settlements in civil suites can take precedence over restrictions and limitations placed on regulatory agencies by Congress.
The EPA does this. They get sued by some environmental push group, then they settle the suit in favor of the plaintiff, thereby getting around any restrictions. A settlement is enforced by a court order; gee our hands are tied, we must abide by the settlement. Sorry.
You have a really really fantastic website, Eric. I’ve been swimming in the YouTube world for the first time and it’s such a huge contrast to the way things are here at EPA.
At least 90% of the comments on YouTube ‘Channels’ are more like, ‘Letters to the Editor’ you used to read in the newspapers. There’s almost no communication between people save for a sliver of about 10% and I imagine things/systems are designed so interactions are limited(?) that way on purpose. A sort of, ‘Together, Apart’ unity?
I see YouTubers describing their Channels as “communities” of this or that subject, but it seems to me they are no such thing for the simple reason that they don’t really communicate – with one another – in any real substantial way.
Before I began swimming in the YouTube world I did not know a person has to sign-in using Google. After I did so, every time I hear a YouTuber say they have free videos I’m reminded of a bit I read once which (I know not why) does not seem to apply to EPA so much,
~ “If something is ‘free’, then you’re the product”.
Happy Trails.
Thanks, Helot!
And, regarding community, I think you and others are going to like what we’ll be launching here soon…
Relaunching the forum? I missed it for a while. I enjoyed, but what’s the motivation behind a relaunch?
Hi Swamp,
It’s going to be more than what it was. It will be part of the main site, for one. But the main thing is it’ll be a place for anyone here to start a conversation/publicize something they are interested in talking about or publicizing. Also, forming networks to connect with like-minded people, openly or privately. I think you’re going to like it!
RE: “forming networks to connect with like-minded people, openly or privately.”
That’s something I noticed a number of times in the comments on YouTube, people wanted to have a way to connect to others, or do the singles thing, and I’m guessing that what’s out there now just didn’t work for them?
YouTube fundamentally changed in 2018 because advertisers were demanding they not allow their ad to run during “controversial” content. So instead of just playing out ads based on who advertisers wanted to reach, the platform shifted to favoring mass apeal and pushing less popular content away. And of course demonitizing anything that wasn’t ad-friendly.
Now that TikTok has gained traction it will be interesting to see what happens to YouTube. Will it go the way of eBay and become the “old mall” after the Amazon Galleria opened?
2018 was when Youtube started really censoring comments. Not even of a political nature, comment threads that were years old got shut down as ‘Comments Unavailable’. The slightest thing resembling a red pill even contained in great rock band videos were shut down. Thought it was weird at the time seems like just another sign of the times.
I wish Google/You tube would die, gasping for breath, choking on 6 billion masks. I’d put long term puts on them if they weren’t such special people. Too big to fail
I managed to devoid myself of all things Google a few months ago, when I changed my email account from Gmail to Proton. I do have an Android phone, but everything that can be disabled is disabled. Phone service and text are the only features that work, and it’s never connected. Google is by far the most actively engaged with the Psychopaths In Charge of any of the tech companies. We know they lie, and they know we know they lie, but they continue to lie as if we don’t.
“Living in a land of make believe, and trying not to let it show”
Moody Blues.
‘Moody Blues: The Land Of Make-Believe’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsWSXDAAOxU
Can’t say as I’ve heard that one before.
helot,
From their album Seventh Sojourn. By far their best work.
First time I heard it was on my buddy’s eight track player in his car, after we had dropped some acid. 50 years ago, more or less.
If you can, use a de-googled phone using Lineage or other AOSP based operating system.
My old Note 3 runs Lineage 18, which is based on Android 11.
These devices support Lineage
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/