This is about my old website Fagan Finder… usually I include these updates only on Fagan Finder’s blog, but the RSS feed for that blog is broken and I am not fixing it right now…
Generally I don’t have time for the site, so I ignore it, and over the last few years I guess Google emailed me to tell me they were doing something with the ads and didn’t have the patience to investigate. More recently I visited the site and see that what used to be a simple banner ad at the top, and a smaller one lower down the page had metastasized into all sorts of different ads all over the page, including big ones that covered it up and “links” within the page text masquerading as the site’s content.
Removing the ads
I’ve had enough of that so I went in and removed all the ads completely. It’s not as if it was making me any significant amount of money and the experience had become unusable.
Of course it’s hard for me to finally get into the code and just leave everything else alone when I know there’s broken links as well as lots of new resources that could be included. So while I very much have not done a really full update, I have removed many of the broken links, changed a bit of what was there, and added some new things.
New and changed resources
I can’t say whether or when I’ll make further improvements (I update the site so infrequently that every time I do I also want to do a full redesign), but here’s a few noteworthy changes and additions I’ve made:
- Adjusted the default and Google options. Now, the default search on Fagan Finder is Google, with their AI answer turned off, and with the ‘verbatim’ option turned on, so results must actually match the words you enter (sorta). Yes, there is usefulness in their AI answer and their fuzzy matching, but I have included that as the second option available, and anyhow everyone is perfectly capable of using Google with their default settings without Fagan Finder.
- I’ve removed the defunct search engines, and added some less-well-known newer ones: Brave, Marginalia, Kagi, and MWMBL.
- I’ve added a whole new section for AI large language models.
- The social media section now includes the new Twitter-like services Bluesky, Threads, and the biggest Mastadon server, as well as separate Reddit searches for posts and comments and a newish search engine called ForumScout
I also removed the links from the main page to all other Fagan Finder pages. Those pages still exist for anyone who has been using them, but I don’t want to continue linking to anything that is that outdated. Updating those is not an option any time soon.
Will anyone who abandoned the site because of all the ads return? Probably they’ll never see this update, but at least any new people that arrive won’t have to deal with the ads.