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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 · 15/09/2026
for a moment I thought you said the quiet part out loud...
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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
yes
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
we generally use shared infrastructure so we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. I'm very certain MC uses the same parser, but I never worked with that team
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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 · 20/08/2026
ok but where to put JavaScript
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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 · 14/08/2026
do your identification papers lie about where you coming from?
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
IP location is declared (this is just a text bit you can set for the IPs you manage) to be US, Mountain View, in most cases, but the actual egress points vary. For example, if the IP is assigned to a cluster in ATL, the egress point will be ATL.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
probably better off without the lastmods. at least you save a few bytes
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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 · 06/05/2026
It depends.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
wouldn't "modern systems" understand JavaScript? 🤔 how do you define "modern systems"?
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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 · 20/04/2026
I shouldn't have said that. I definitely shouldn't have said that...
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
... I too miss the 90's internet.
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
I trained it to be as cynical and sarcastic as I am. Not quite sure who's stressing who...
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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 · 24/03/2026
no
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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
leave comments if you have comments. or pull requests.
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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 · 13/03/2026
Have you seen this? github.com/garyillyes/j...
github.com
GitHub - garyillyes/jafar
Contribute to garyillyes/jafar development by creating an account on GitHub.
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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 · 03/03/2026
Martin informed me since that md can also have JS so, naturally, my year is ruined
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
does that mean we'll have a JavaScript-less internet?! 🥹
media.tenor.com
a close up of a cartoon snail with a purple background
ALT: a close up of a cartoon snail with a purple background
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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 · 04/02/2026
I don't know
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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
I don't know
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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 · 17/01/2026
ah, that was a good, albeit exhausting day. relatedly, also the day I learned the word "stanchion" o.O
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
ah yes, the two loves of my life. my talk will be titled "how to get fired 101"
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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
oh great, you broke it
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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
curl?
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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
KEDAKAI! AS GOD MADE HIM
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
oh, drive-by Conan. we should be friends
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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 · 30/10/2025
fine
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
can we stop now
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Gary Illyes @methode.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
not particularly, no
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