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Have you set up a Google Sites website ? Beware - it may never appear in Google Searches….

This is by way of a follow-up to my first blog on Google Indexing. First a quick recap of the background…. I set up one of the new Google Sites offerings in June 2021 with the intention of using it as an online repository, primarily to share information and small amounts data with friends and acquaintances.  As the site developed, I added new pages. These were intended to provide some space for more general guides I had been asked for, and to share information on various topics with the wider community. I have to admit I'm not a great social media 'fan' for a number of reasons,  so I prefer to use a website and blog for this purpose.  At this point, I wanted to establish whether the site had already appeared on search engine indexes, and if not, what I could do to expedite the process. To cut a long story short, I found within the first 3 months that almost every major search engine had indexed elements of my site except Google . Needless to say I was quite surpris...
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UK TV Broadcasting – Is the Licence Fee an Anachronism or an Essential ?

The short answer to this question is that, for the BBC at least, it’s both an anachronism and an essential…. The licence fee was originally introduced to fund public broadcasting way back in the 1940s after the enforced break in transmissions caused by WW2. It worked reasonably well while the number of channels was small, TV broadcasting was still analogue, and radio retained a significant audience share. While still reasonably priced, it was probably a fair way of funding public broadcasting. Since the dawn of digital TV in the early 2000s, with its plethora of new commercial channels, the BBC’s ‘market share’ of viewer attention has steadily dwindled, while the licence fee has risen nearly 20-fold, from the princely sum of £10 p.a. for a colour licence in 1968 to the current £180 in 2026. It has fought back to an extent, with introductions of new channels, both on TV an radio, but as we'll see later, these have added to its cost burden considerably, and are likely to be...
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Advanced Search Query Builder: The Easy and Quick Way to do Selective Internet Searches

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  Ever wanted to get rid of those pesky AI summaries that seem to appear nowadays every time you do any kind of internet search ?  Want to bypass AI and 'do your own thing' with a more focussed advanced online search ? Or switch the search engine you're using at the touch of a button ?  Fed up with following up links that turn out to have expired years ago ? Now you can tailor your searches efficiently - and without needing to remember the exact query syntax to use....or even opening a new window. To find out how, just read on….. Background Internet searching has changed a lot over the last few years, due largely to the automatic insinuation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents into everything but the most basic searches by the all the major search engine providers. There is no doubt that those AI summaries which now appear in response to most of our queries can be very useful, particularly for those who know little about a particular subject to start with, and...
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