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Gary Illyes

@methode.bsky.social
1.4K followers 10 following 120 posts

Google's house elf

PostsRepliesMedia
Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Depending on what side of LinkedIn you're on, you're going to run across JEV, hyped as the new shit of LLMs. It is not. It's the marketing hype of discriminative models, induced by some folks discovering that frontier LLMs really shouldn't be used for classification tasks (for a bunch of reasons)
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
LLMs really really suck at being random. Much like hallucinations, that isn't a bug. It's how autoregressive models work, it's by design. Testing an LLM with a coin flip tells you nothing about its actual "intelligence" or reasoning capability; it just reveals human training data bias. I like 7.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Google's crawlers don't parse JSON, they just download things. Parsing anything is done by, for example, indexing in case of Search.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
IP addresses don't have a "geographic location". They typically default to whatever the registrant's location is, or they're defaulted to some location based on BGP anycast routes. Think about addresses like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. Where do you put these on a map? They're technically everywhere...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Gemini might have had enough of my nonsense. That period is ruthless...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
brb. need to blow up our snowman www.sechselaeuten.ch
sechselaeuten.ch
Das zünftige Zürcher Frühlingsfest | Sächsilüüte
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Gemini just told me it's a pleasure working with me, so, yeah... I'm def putting this on my resume
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Processing crawl complaints, sometimes I wish I could throw some hosters under the bus. Why would you redirect your client to us for "excessive CPU usage" when the WHOLE MONTH there were about 1000 fetches from us from the WHOLE DOMAIN?!?!
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Gary: I can't get this stupid ai to do anything right. Gary's prompts: Found a second cottage cheese, yes we did, precious! A cold lumpy 115g of it... and so salty, it stings our throat! What we do with it my love? We mix it with the nasty leaves? Garden-salads? Or do we eat it raw, just as it is?
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
A couple weeks ago we accidentally posted on LinkedIn the wrong description for a podcast episode. The comments under that post seem to be a great way to find automated accounts. www.linkedin.com/posts/google...
linkedin.com
Googlebot Reality: Misnomer and SaaS Infrastructure | Google Search Central posted on the topic | LinkedIn
Think Googlebot is just a single "googlebot.exe" program we can run? In the latest episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes dive deep into the reality of Google's crawling infr...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
I'm perpetually confused about people liking our ramblings in these podcast episodes. youtu.be/JpweMBnpS4Q
youtu.be
Google crawlers behind the scenes
YouTube video by Google Search Central
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
ARE YOU TELLING ME MY LYNX BROWSER NEEDS TO BE UPDATED?!?!
Terminal screen of the lynx browser displaying google.com, which prompts the user to update their browser
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Who comes up with a name like "Punch, the monkey"?! No wonder everyone is bullying the poor thing
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Ten points for... well, not effort for sure
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Genius tech bro move: Inventing the paragraph, Calling it a chunk. #showerthoughts
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
#showerthought What if the moltbook is not a demonstration of sentience, but a reflection of humans' (and bots') online shenanigans.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
#showerthought LLMs rarely reply with "I don't know" to a prompt because we, humans, rarely ever admit online that we don't know something.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
The coding agent I'm testing just suggested that we send temperature readings in Celsius to an LLM to make conversions to Fahrenheit, instead of making the conversion on the device, because ultimately we want reliability. So, yeah...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
Posit 1: browsers don't particularly care about the status code of the parent frame, they'll happily display wherever content the server sent. Posit 2: crawlers very much care about the status code and they'll drop anything with non-content/transition status. #MisuseEverything
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
"Cursor CEO warns vibe coding builds ‘shaky foundations’ and eventually ‘things start to crumble’" fortune.com/2025/12/25/c...
media.tenor.com
a bald man wearing a suit and tie is sitting in front of a starz logo
ALT: a bald man wearing a suit and tie is sitting in front of a starz logo
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
If we migrated the googlebot.json file to a new location with a 301 redirect, would that break your fetches? Or the fetcher would just follow the redirect developers.google.com/static/searc...
developers.google.com
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
www.google.com/search?q=67 I'm so confused...
google.com
Google Search
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
Subtwee... subblue: using something as an API doesn't make it an official API. developers.google.com/search/blog/...
developers.google.com
Update on the Autocomplete API  |  Google Search Central Blog  |  Google for Developers
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Ask me how it's going at the Shenzhen SEO Conference.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Why do crawlers generally have a per-resource bytesize limit, like Googlebot's 15Mb? The internet: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467...
news.ycombinator.com
A valid HTML zip bomb | Hacker News
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
24 CPU cores working for 35 hours to train a model, 1% left to completion, and accuracy and loss values look phenomenal. Windows update restarts the PC...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Allegedly intelligent systems that allegedly excel at summarization requiring a manually updated file that essentially says what a site is about feels as intuitive as a sign explaining that the provided toilet paper is not meant to be used for giftwrapping the toilet.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
SEO was claimed dead in 1997. web.archive.org/web/19981206...
web.archive.org
NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Search engines are dying
I'm beginning to believe that search engines are a dead-end technology and fretting over where your site comes up is a big waste of time. I'm now advising clients that we create good META tags, submit the site and then forget it.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
O.M.G. PEOPLE! UPDATING THE COPYRIGHT YEAR IN THE BOTTOM OF YOUR PAGES IS NOT A SIGNIFICANT UPDATE, NO NEED TO UPDATE YOUR LASTMOD
media.tenor.com
a man wearing a wig is holding his head and the words oh my god are below him
ALT: a man wearing a wig is holding his head and the words oh my god are below him
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
Just finished listening to the latest episode of SciShow Tangents, which means I've listened to every single one of the Tangents episodes @hankgreen.bsky.social et al. put out on the public web. AMA open.spotify.com/wrapped/shar...
open.spotify.com
My #1 podcast of 2024 – listen now
2024 Wrapped
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
Nothing says better "I want to wipe out my site from search" than these bad boys. Ok HTTP status codes do. And "noindex". Connection issues? Ok there are many things.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 13/06/2023
🔥 It's kinda fun watching people lose their shit about the Reddit blackout and blaming centralization, when Usenet (and more recently Tor) had the same problem, but with decentralized communities. You woke up and the community was not there anymore. Then Verizon and co fixed that with centralization
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 12/06/2023
you can't spell cat without a...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 07/06/2023
"site: example.com" =/= "site:example.com"
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 06/06/2023
While the crypto folks were pushing web3 on the blockchain, there was quite extensive work being done on quantum communications. In fact China demonstrated that entangled photons can carry information to and from a satellite. Somehow, investing time and money in this seems more sensible?
scientificamerican.com
China Reaches New Milestone in Space-Based Quantum Communications
The nation’s Micius satellite successfully established an ultrasecure link between two ground stations separated by more than 1,000 kilometers
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 05/06/2023
The mitigation on Google's side is now in place so at least Google services are back online in the Philippines. Would love to hear your theories about how an incident like the one described in the article I linked to is mitigated by multi-cluster service owners.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 05/06/2023
Looks like a cable cut in South/South-East Asia is severely affecting internet users in the Philippines: unbox.ph/news/major-internet-outage…
unbox.ph
Major Internet Outage in the Philippines? Google, Facebook Down
(UPDATE 2): PLDT released a statement to the ongoing internet problem: One of our submarine cable partners confirms a loss in some of its internet bandwidth capacity, and thus causing slower internet ...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 02/06/2023
Check your firewalls and access rules: if you want to use the inspection tools in Search Console, you must allow Google-InspectionTool to access your site (and your clients' sites, if you're a hoster or such)
developers.google.com
Google Crawler (User Agent) Overview | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers
Google crawlers discover and scan websites. This overview will help you understand the common Google crawlers including the Googlebot user agent.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 01/06/2023
Should we add something new to sitemaps?
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