midef

I haven't heard the podcast. Did they make the distinction between "lab created" and "accidental release?"

Some of Wade's ideas are interesting, but I don't like his guilty-until-proven-innocent tone regarding lab creation.

On the other hand, accidental release is a different matter with clear precedent. It is generally accepted that SARS-CoV originated in animals, yet it also generally accepted that SARS-CoV was accidentally released from multiple laboratories in the early 2000s, resulting in pocket outbreaks:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

The point isn't about Nvidia graphic cards, but rather, the Nvidia-backed website that is being used to generate false personalities on the fly (and what people can do to avoid being tricked by the technology): https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

I like playing around with "Million Short" - https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect, of course, but its a fun way to discover things.

The web wasn't mob-like at all in the beginning. Most of the content was created by reasonably educated people who were publishing because of passion, not profit or other motives.

"information has never been easier to find!"

I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.

GM is in the news because of its respirator production and the search results are dynamic. I've seen Gmail rank #2 or #3 for that search.

This isn't surprising. It's always worth paying a little extra for UL/ETL/CSA registered goods. Especially electrical goods.

If you're into audio, $299 for a pair of KEF Q150s is a steal (especially for the walnut ones): https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07VCLVRVL/ref=twister_B071SGSFW...

Have you considered a mesh Wi-Fi system?

The spirit of the idea is that Google will see the 304 status and move onto the next page more quickly than if it received a 200 status and reconciled that version of the page with the version that was previously crawled.

Amen to that. Too many pages are complex for no real reason.

Polluted crawl error reports won't effect organic rankings, but they will make it harder to discover a legitimate page that is broken, but shouldn't be.

Cree's 1st generation LED bulbs are one of the worst purchases that I've made. I outfitted my entire house with them, but they started dropping like flies. The failure rate was around 50% and the cost of shipping back a bulb under warranty was the same as buying a new one.

It's a good article. There are some quotes in it that galvanize my point. E.g.

"I know for a fact that it’s possible to circumvent these sandbox effects. If a site goes even somewhat viral and is getting a few hundred to a few thousand daily unique visits, some social media mentions each day, and real backlinks, that site will immediately be taken seriously by Google’s algorithms. I’ve seen this happen twice so far with brand new websites, eventually ranking #1 for their top keywords."

My experience has been the same. Except in this case...and it just struck me as strange.

All true (and thanks for the detailed response!). I wasn't expecting the world, but, I did think the site would see some traction by this point based on other experiences that I've had.

Funny aside: My pre-sabbatical day job was working for the publisher of Tom's Guide and TechRadar.

Tom's Guide is a point of pride for me. It was a fledgling site when our company acquired it in 2013 and I had the pleasure of watching its organic traffic grow 9,900% and hit 40MM visitors in a month. Man, did that feel good!

It's true that the JS bundle is a bottleneck on mobile page speed.

I didn't set out to do SEO for this site. Rather, I'm building something that I would use. (I like to read the full text of a page, so I suppose I'm an outlier.)

It's a (polarizing) design choice that I'm sticking with (for now). Some folks tell me it's a dealbreaker, but others say they love it. My inspiration was: https://text.npr.org

The only link in the press release is the name of the website. The goal of the press release was to get press, not links. It was a dud (save your money if you're considering announcing a new website this way).

I believe this is against Amazon's terms (though large sites do some variation of this all the time).

I weed out the products that have excessive fake reviews, above-average prices and some other interesting "tells" that I've discovered (e.g. the 4-star reviews are amended 1-star reviews that have been changed because the customer received a replacement product).

I considered this and decided to withhold affiliate links for the first couple months of the site's existence. It didn't seem to make much of a difference one way or another.

Well said. The biggest problems these days stem from things like client-side rendering and making crawler-accessible versions of things that are using new technologies (like simple pagination for infinite scroll, etc.).

I didn't write any of that content for SEO purposes. In many cases, it's an opportunity to clear the air about misconceptions that people have (sometimes, dangerous misconceptions). Is there a specific page that you found useless?

Thanks for the encouragement and double thanks for emphasizing the word "believes." I work hard to make the content as short as possible while still being useful, but it's true that Google may not be able to see the value in that (at least, without a lot of user feedback signals).

Thanks for detailed comments. Many of the design choices that I made for the site are polarizing (like the decision to include no images). Same goes for the content: My goal is to help people get in and out of the site in five minutes or less. It's a bummer when that seems like a cop out. I've found it much harder to write short (and meaningful) content than it is to write longform.

I'm genuinely surprised that the site hasn't found more traction than it has. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't expecting to set the world on fire or outrank the big players, but I have seen young sites do a lot more with a lot less (including some of my own).