Interesting Links for 19-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Welsh independence: Leaving UK is viable, says new report (as is a federal UK)

(tags:uk wales independence )

2. Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

(tags:google search doom )

Comments

[cmcmck]

I though we already had a federal UK but were just unwilling to admit it!

[rhythmaning]

There is so much centralisation of power in London that we are a very long way from federalism.

[cmcmck]

Although that said, living where we do in Shropshire, you hardly notice the great wen.

[andrewducker]

A federal system would made of more equal pieces. So you'd need to split England into a bunch of pieces with 5-15 million people each, and give them all powers equivalent to, say, what Scotland has now.

[cmcmck]

They tried going down that road of course and no one much seemed to like it.

It works for others so why not for us is my own view.

[andrewducker]

That was handled so badly. Such a shame.

[movingfinger]

Last year I did a lot of research into particular brands of bidets and read up on installations, durability, reliability, and maintenance. I found lots of good discussion pages on various sites, particularly on plumbing forums, and was able to make what I hope is an informed choice.

Now, I can't find most of those pages and sites. My iPad, on which I must have done a lot of the research, blows away Safari history after a month, so I can't check my own history for the sites. I am an experienced web-searcher used to honing my keywords to get what I want, and it's 98% garbarge, autocomplete-generated SEO crap. The few potentially useful sites still turning up in the earlier listings are not helpful, which would be fine in a larger set of more helpful sites but isn't under these conditions. After about 15 or 20 sites, pure random garbage packs the results, completely unrelated topics.

It's incredibly frustrating. There were sites with step-by-step instructions that are probably still out there, but now they're under an avalanche of crap... and this is on DuckDuckGo as well as Google.

[channelpenguin]

:-(. That's dreadful. For us all.