Google is set to freeze all CSEs

Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) have a new tablet-centric Control Panel. It’s not good news. As usual with such tea-boy tinkering, it’s a big step backwards and not just in the user interface. It removes absolutely vital features needed to manage a CSE of any size.

There are two major problems with the new Control Panel.

1. A key and vital feature of the old Panel was the ability to quickly check (‘Filter’) what you had in your URL list, before adding a new URL. You’d paste or type in part of an URL, and instantly see if you already have it in the list.

This vital feature has been removed in the new Panel. There is no longer any ‘Filter’ option, anywhere.

2. I’ve also looked all over the new Control Panel, and it appears that Google have shut down the ability to export your URL list to an .XML file. This is what you had before…

This is another vital feature, which is now nowhere to be found anywhere in the new Panel.

Regrettably, the notice today is that: “The legacy Control Panel is still available but will be removed in the future.”

Thus, back up your CSE’s .XML annotations (i.e. the URL list) now, before it’s too late.

Without the vital “Filter” option, having a local .XML of the URLs will be the only way to quickly check what’s in your CSE. Indeed, it will be the only way to see the whole of what is in your CSE at all.

With the removal of these two vital features, Google is effectively set to “freeze” all larger Google CSEs. Because old URLs in a large CSE will no longer be able to be found and updated. They can’t be re-found for fixing, even if you know they’re in there (because you have the .XML spreadsheet with the full list). Thus, your CSE can no longer be maintained over time.

Action required…

An Open Access Scholarly Encyclopedia for Music: A Call to Action.

Subject to change

“Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service”, Journal of Documentation, May 2020.

… the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles [is] not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.

Stuckdemia.edu

It appears that, as of Summer 2020, only inbound links from Google Scholar can trigger a public PDF download from Academia.edu. Other public download attempts, if not logged in to the service, get a “404”. Readers may wish to update any link-lists accordingly.

Dumb devices

Oh dear, it’s 2020 and the biggest and most AI-powered services on the planet are still relying on dumb keyword-blocking. AbeBooks reports that the pulp sci-fi double-bill paperback Mask of Chaos/The Star Virus has been classed by Amazon as a “medical device” and banned from sale.

Ironically, Amazon is still listing bat faeces sent from China, delivered to your door here in the UK. Apparently medical pseudo-science believes it to be a remedy for poor eyesight.

DOI hard

“On the Persistence of Persistent Identifiers of the Scholarly Web” is a new paper from Los Alamos, finding that many DOIs in a 10,000 random sample are unreachable…

“consistently across request methods, more than half of our DOIs fail to successfully resolve to a target resource”

Despite the misleading “2004” tag on the page identifier tag, the paper was actually presented in March 2020 at the CNI Spring 2020 Project Briefings.

UK Social Media Archive

The UK’s government’s completist and public Social Media Archive is now reported to be fully operational and primed, after its 2014 soft launch. Although a quick test shows that ‘exclude word’ still doesn’t work, in terms of removing results…

The worthless Peter Lowe ad-blocking list

The Peter Lowe ad-blocking list is obviously now worthless, due to its over-reach and scattergun blocking of all sorts of legitimate things. Back in June I found it blocking Harvard. I’ve since found all sorts of similar blocks on things that should not be blocked. I’ve unsubscribed my browser’s ad-blocker addon from the Peter Lowe list, and I suggest that you also consider doing so.

How many users are Google’s captcha’s driving away from the service?

Google Search’s captcha’s are becoming intensely annoying. You can’t seem to go more than five pages of results deep with the same search before Google throws up a captcha, even with a relatively unsophisticated verbatim search such as “author name” “annotated”. And it’s not happening because I’ve been hammering the service in other ways.

Off the Clifford

A demonstration of the limited range Google.com can offer, these days. One of the top all-time greats in science-fiction literature, at page six of the results on his distinctive name. The results dribble away to spam and essay-writing services, at a mere six pages and 103 results. Searching for the name with capitals, as “Clifford Simak”, makes no difference.