I needed a link to my IF blog in the middle of writing an email and so googled its name:
wades important astrolab
At the top of the results page appeared an AI spiel about a non-existent game written by a character in a game I reviewed in that blog nine years ago:
“Wade’s Important Astrolabe” refers to a highly-regarded interactive fiction (IF) game by Ms. Lojka, praised for its morbid intrigue, stunning aesthetics, and sophisticated presentation, contrasting with simpler Twine games, and exploring themes of mental illness and the supernatural in a unique setting, unlike typical IF fare. An “astrolabe” itself is an ancient astronomical instrument, a portable analog computer for time-telling and celestial navigation, with key parts like the mater, rete, and plates, with uses ranging from prayer times to scientific advancement.
The Game: Wade’s Important Astrolabe
Author: Ms. Lojka (also known as Evita Sempai).
Genre: Interactive Fiction (Twine game).
Key Features: Morbid themes, supernatural elements, high production value (audio/visual), slow, deliberate pace, and focus on a single character’s life.
Significance: Noted for its unique atmosphere and design, making it stand out in the IF landscape.
I’m not seeing what you’re seeing with those links. I’m seeing my own Google results. The first thing that comes up is: What is an Astrolabe? - Turks and Caicos Museum. And your blog’s not on any of the pages. I went through 9 of them. o.O I had to put it in quotes to get it to come up in Google.
But Brave has your blog at number 1, right out of the box..
The term “Wade’s important astrolab” refers to the blog of Wade Clarke, an interactive fiction (IF) reviewer and author.
About Wade’s Important Astrolab
Content: The blog is used by Wade Clarke to document his progress on his own interactive fiction projects (such as “Andromeda Acolytes” and “Dragon’s Pass”), share ideas, and publish reviews of various IF games, including entries from competitions like Spring Thing and IFComp.
Recognition: The blog is a known entity within the interactive fiction community and is listed on “Planet IF” and cited in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) as a source for game reviews.
That’s the problem with these AI overviews; everyone can get their own unique slightly-to-extremely inaccurate answers to the same question, as if there weren’t enough organically created misinformation on the internet already.
Now that I’ve created this topic and google has indexed this page, I also believe its existence changes results.
However, it’s interesting that @DrkStarr almost couldn’t find my blog at all. That was my own experience trying to google it.
On the other hand, @Hidnook says she got my blog almost straight away. Could this be because of the indexing of this topic and/or the scraping of AI bots?
Today, me googling ‘wades important astrolab’ (but without quotes) suggests wade’s important astrolabE is an Arturia synthesizer, but then the rest of the results look similar to what I got yesterday, including no direct link to the named blog on pages, until…
OMG! At result 9 I found a link to my review of ‘Confessing to a Witch’, on IFDB, which erroneously uses the text Wade’s Important AstrolabE!
A site search of ifdb reveals that’s the only place with the wrong name. I suppose I’ll fix that up for form sake but, uh, I don’t know if I expect any of the other weirdnesses (not being able to google a direct link to my blog) to right themselves.
Google automatically (and often silently) normalizes the text you’re searching for unless it’s in quotes, so I expect it’s changing your search to “astrolabE”, which then doesn’t match your blog.
I think I understood that intuitively. But when I do a search with quotes and correct spelling and an apostrophe, I still don’t get the blog. The closest hits are always 1 link away (e.g. my Blogger profile page. A link to it on my homepage.) and there are only 3 pages of them. So there’s some additional oddness specific to it.
I just ignore the AI summary and skip to the first real search result as quickly as possible whenever I do a google search… I also usually include the keyword wikipedia or the name of a appropriate wiki dedicated to the subject(e.g. Bulbapedia if I’m googling anything related to Pokemon) or just the word wiki if I don’t know of a specific wiki related to the subject and think what I’m looking for is too niche for Wikipedia… Not a fool proof method, but usually pretty good at filtering out the social media bullshitters and the people who parrot them without knowing better and I’m not sure one can do better without access to and knowledge to comprehend paywalled academic journals(for anything scientific) or doing one’s own research on the source material(anything pop culture, and let’s be honest, going over the source material for some obscure detail is easier said than done, especially for large, multiple media franchises, when you don’t speak the source’s original language and all available translations into your native tongue are questionable, or when the source is primarily expressed in visual media and one is blind)
That said, the anecdote about trying to google one’s own website makes me glad I have my own website bookmarked in my web browser in the unlikely event I forget my domain name… though the real reason I have it bookmarked is so I can test newly uploaded pages and can navigate to and copy URLs of specific content I want to share that I’ve uploaded there.
