FINALLY

Their Googleness finally fixed the Blogroll:

As of September 30, 2026 at 8:49 AM EST.

That is all. Back to your regularly scheduled doomscrolling.

Only Two Years Younger than an iPhone

 Seventeen years ago, the first post on Parallel Context appeared. 

That was long enough ago that the graphics that Souldat* linked to in that first post no longer work. Hell, the site warcraftrealms.com itself resolves to warcraftdb.com these days as it effectively shut down in 2023.**

Oh, and if you ever wondered, Souldat was biased toward the Horde from the beginning as his first post made pretty plain. Given that I now play Alliance most of the time, it certainly feels odd reading that first post again.

Anyway, PC has been around long enough that it ought to be applying to colleges right about now. I certainly hope that it has a decent safety school selected, because the cost of attending a university isn't cheap.

*He used Murtaugh as his handle back then, and changed it several times over the next several years as his main changed.

**Links not being maintained are a big reason why I make local copies of pictures and/or other graphics these days; that way I know there will be a working graphic when I return to a very old post from the future. I suppose I could spend a month cleaning up old links and trying to figure out what ought to go there, but I'd rather get it right the first time.

Why Am I Now Getting Google Analytics Ads?

Seriously.

Email received as of September 8, 2026.

I don't get it.

I've not had a blip of email from Google Analytics --aside from the rare Google Notifications email-- in ages, and now within the past couple of weeks I've begun getting semi-regular spam from Google itself.

Email received as of September 3, 2026.

This is the sort of thing that appears when a post --typically a Meme Monday-- gets an inordinate amount of clicks. Let's be real here: those clicks are most likely web crawlers and LLM bots and they just happened upon this blog. It's not as if I suddenly gained 10k readers or something. Yes, Google Analytics shows a bit of a boost at the beginning of September, but like I said, it looks like it's going to be pretty temporary:

Screencap of Google Analytics' active user
trend for the past 90 days as of September 14, 2026.

As you can see, it's already reverting to the mean, so I'm not exactly shocked here. Still, why all the sudden spam from Google Analytics like the email I led with, anyway?

I figure it has to be that the results of two weeks worth of 80k+ users has something to do with it, and that Google's algorithm has decided I'm worth "investing" in.

I did hop on the Google Search Console just to see if that translated into Google finally acknowledging that PC exists as a Blogger blog, but...

Google Search Console Indexing Chart
as of September 14, 2026.

Google still hasn't indexed anything from PC lately. However, note the sudden spike on August 10, 2026. I went from 1031 to 2646 pages "Not Indexed". I'm not sure what to make about that, but there was one change to the environment: 

Google Search Console Sitemap Info
as of September 14, 2026.

I periodically re-submit the sitemap.xml that Blogger automatically generates, just to see if one part of the vast Google Empire can interact with another. And whaddya know, this time it actually read the XML file! It may not have all of the pages on PC discovered, but it's a lot better than what I have had in the past:

Google Search Console as of January 17, 2026.

We'll see if anything comes of all this rigamarole, but I'm still confused as to the big question: Why now?

The only reasonable explanation is that PC suddenly became big enough to register, but that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm more likely to believe that the wheels of Google just suddenly aligned and spat out some weird results. I'm not about to ascribe the sudden interest to anything I did, since I've been doing the same thing for years. 

So... Thank you, LLM bots... I guess...

***

There has been one other weird development that I wanted to mention and see if anybody else has noticed:

PC Front Page as of
September 14, 2026.

It may not look that interesting to you, but I noticed right before I left this past weekend that Bhagpuss of Inventory Full hadn't put out a new post in several days. Given that Bhagpuss is quite prolific, I found that quite odd. At first I thought "Well, he probably went on vacation," but when I looked on his blog he quite obviously had more recent posts:

Inventory Full's front page as of September 14, 2026.

I thought that maybe there was a problem with his feed, but then I noticed that all of the blogs on my Front Page that use Blogger hadn't been updated in over a week as well (see above). 

And yes, I did check several of them, so I'd need not bore you with extra screencaps.

So yeah, there's an issue with Blogger where the feed isn't getting updated. Is that happening with anybody else?

Duck Duck Go Goes Where Google Doesn't

Well, duh.

If you've heard of Duck Duck Go, you know that it has hung its hat on your privacy, whereas Google has prioritized company profits. I've been moving my search more and more over to Duck Duck Go, and one big relief from my end is that DDG does believe that this blog exists:

I even got ahead of the AI Context Parallelism
blog. From August 12, 2026.

That makes me feel pretty good to know that both Bing and DDG know I exist. Alas, Google still thinks I'm a figment of people's imagination:

As of August 12, 2026.

Their AI doesn't even have the correct blog, much less a direct entry to it. Thanks to Atheren for referencing me at least that one time, which is how Google knows there might be something there.

And for completeness, here's Bing's results:

As of August 12, 2026.

Funny how the graphic they have there is a pretty old one about Mass Effect, but hey, at least I'm at the top of the search results.

I've kind of given up trying to understand why the supposed "best search engine evah" can't find a blog that's been around since 2009 and has over 1800 published posts. I guess they want money from me to suddenly "improve" my search results --I know that Bing does-- which would effectively turn Google into the 2020's version of Yahoo. You know, that's not exactly a comparison I'd be proud of if I were Google.

#Blaugust2026

We Are the Limitation

In the era of LLMs, you can't hide.

Whatever you say will be pulled out from the internet and presented to you, so you might want to be a bit wary about that.

Of course, Google still doesn't know PC exists, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Data as of June 1st, 2026.

List of Indexed Pages, as of June 1, 2026.

As you can see, Google has completely wiped out all of the "Indexed" web pages owned by Parallel Context, as if Google decided they didn't really exist. They are presently listed as "Scanned, Not Indexed", so if you can imagine the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a bit like that.

Google: "Top men are working on it."
Indiana Jones: "Who?"
Google: "Top. Men."

So when Google decided to announce changes to their search interface on May 19, 2026, I made a collective yawn. It doesn't matter how fancy the interface is, if Google itself isn't finding or indexing the data, you're not going to find it on Google.

I have been amused by the fact that Google and other AI companies might just be missing a major problem with their push to make everybody irrelevant: their own data pool. 

Copyright issues notwithstanding, if your search engine's webcrawlers aren't providing you with data --and I presume that a small blog like mine isn't the only website that has issues appearing on a normal google search-- then your AI isn't really being trained as effectively as you think.

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

 And just for completeness (and, well, to rub Google's nose in it), Microsoft Bing knows I exist:

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

That's damning with faint praise, as I'm really sick about Copilot this and Copilot that. Even though Microsoft threw in the towel and is beginning to back off from pushing the Copilot button so aggressively, they're not exactly giving up on Copilot either. 

And remember Google Glass? The eyeglass wearable that ended up being pulled by Google because people who wore them started getting beat up by people who resented being on video without consent? Well, fast forward to 2026, and Meta, Apple, and Amazon have made eyeglass wearables a thing now. And nobody cares anymore that they're being recorded.

Given that I can go to the grocery store and (unintentionally) be following someone up and down the aisles and hear both sides of their entire conversation for 40 minutes, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I don't think any of the people who behave like this --and there are far far more of them than I'd ever have believed-- realize that anybody could record them and then use their discussions against them because they are holding a conversation in public. 

This goes on all the time, and I'm the one who gets funny looks when I put my earbuds on when I'm at the grocery store, although that might be due to me using wired earbuds more than anything else. No, I don't hold phone conversations at the store, although I have been known to call home to ask whether Brand X or Y is fine since Z isn't in stock. No, I put on my earbuds to keep the noise at bay (I have tinnitus) and so I don't have to listen in on whatever the latest gossip that some fellow customer is insisting I hear by talking loudly into a phone a couple of feet from me.

I guess it's only a matter of time before all of these wearables such as the eyeglasses become used by Big Tech to feed LLMs. And I'd bet money that even then, Parallel Context won't show up on a simple Google search.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Part Whatever

I guess I should be happy that Google can't really figure out if this blog exists, because AI bots are starting to become a real problem. 

(As if they're not one already.)

Yes, the number of indexed pages on this blog
actually went down over the course of the
past month. I guess Google kind of lost
the plot. Graph as of February 17, 2026.

Tech engineer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling experienced problems due to AI swamping his GitHub and AI agents causing disruption in the open source community:

And the popular LINUX distro, LINUX Mint,* had their forums swamped with AI bots back in January, nearly bringing down the entire system:

These are just two that I'm aware of; I'm almost certain there's more out there that I haven't observed yet.

This bubble can't pop quickly enough.

*I found out about LINUX Mint while researching a LINUX OS to install on my mom's old laptop that doesn't support Windows 11 yet is perfectly fine for use.

"I'm a WHAT now?"

One of the more interesting things about my struggle to figure out why this blog has not been indexed by Google Search lately has been that I've discovered that the term "parallel context" is now being used by Large Language Model training.

The term "Parallel Context Windows" appears to have been first utilized in 2022 in a paper published here, which is alternately amusing and vexing. It wouldn't shock me if a lot of the bot traffic here has been attracted to PC simply because of the name's utilization in AI development.

This is the search result using incognito mode
(to remove any trained tendencies from my
account) on January 17, 2026.

Yeah, I mean, "parallel context" as a naming convention isn't exactly unusual, but the annoying part is that it just HAD to show up in AI-related activity. 

That being said, I did update the "About Parallel Context" to reference that this blog predates the usage of the term with LLMs and AI by over a decade*, so hopefully nobody comes knocking on my door with some weird cease and desist by my usage of the term on this blog. If someone does, I might need to get in touch with Rick Beato to find out what lawyer he uses to fight off YouTube strikes from the big music conglomerates.

As for whether this little discovery has an impact on PC's search engine indexing, it probably doesn't. Just a hunch here, but given that Google has started slowly indexing some of my blog posts over the past week or two I don't believe it actually has an impact.

As of January 17, 2026.

The indexing listing above shows that I'm actually getting some pages indexed. And that's despite Google Search still hasn't acknowledged the sitemap.xml that Microsoft Bing approved back in September 2025.

As of January 17, 2026.

So, you've got me as to what changed.

I did try to see if I could "fix" the issues with the "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" error by removing the mobile device option for the blog,

The main error listings as of January 17, 2026.

And the detailed results of the "alternate page"
error, on January 17, 2026.

which as you see all have the mobile designation of "m=1" present. After several days, however, the resubmission still returned an error, so the issue isn't with that.**

But there are posts being indexed, so... Again, go figure.

If nothing else, I either need to 'git gud' with understanding the details about Google Search results or hire a "Search Whisperer" to understand the arcane details of the search process.

Cardwyn: You need someone to help you understand the Arcane?

Me: I said arcane details, not the Arcane.

Cardwyn: Oh. Because my rates are low, and you could use the help.

Me: ...

I ought to not let this stuff bug me so much as it does, since I've got enough things I'm working on the past several months, but the lack of understanding the why of it does get under my skin. And now, knowing that the blog's name has been utilized in a field that has nothing to do with the subject of this blog is like a mosquito bite that you can't help but scratch because it itches so damn bad but you know you shouldn't scratch it at all. 

Oh well.

*For any people doing research on "Parallel Context Windows" and happened to stumble on this post, This blog Parallel Context has been around since September 2009 and is still being actively updated with posts as of January 17, 2026. So yeah, PC has been around a lot longer than the current LLM and AI research.

**I did switch it back this morning, likely after Shintar posted a comment this morning about potential changes but before I saw her comment myself. So, Shintar and others who use mobile devices to read the blog can read it much better.

EtA: I cleaned up some formatting.

At Least I'm Recognized in China

Call me amused, but it seems that while Google can't figure out that Parallel Context exists, Chinese web crawlers can.

I was alerted to this little item when I received a Google Notification about the blog that there was a spike in activity on the 6th:

As of 12/8/2025.

Of which was primarily from China:

As of 12/8/2025.

And yet when I got onto the Google Search console, this greeted me:

As of 12/8/2025.

So you can see that Google still refuses/ignores the presence of Parallel Context, while the Chinese web crawlers seem to have found PC. Once again, I've found that Google's search engine isn't really as impressive as they like to think. They can't even blame it on Blogger, which is owned by Google itself, because Bhagpuss' blog Inventory Full is easily found via Google Search:

As of 12/8/2025.

This is starting to get to ridiculous levels of incompetence, because there's no apparent reason why the blog doesn't show up in Google's direct search results. After all, PC continues to show up in Microsoft's Bing Search console:

As of 12/8/2025.

And in true Microsoft fashion, they want me to pay to "improve" my visibility on search results, 

As of 12/8/2025.

But I think I'll pass. Just goes to show that Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to monetize everything so they can then pump that money into AI (and Satya Nadella's compensation package). But at least their own search engine, Bing, can actually find a 16 year old blog that has almost 1700 posts on it, whereas Google stumbles over itself in the dark, claiming that a Blogger-inserted mobile option "https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/?m=1" causes a Redirect error...

Again, as of 12/8/2025.

...when you can click the link above and see that the link works perfectly fine in bringing up a mobile-friendly version of the blog. If Google wants to bitch about that, they should talk to their Blogger division. But then again, since Inventory Full is working fine and it's a Blogger blog, I'd say that the problem has less to do with anything Blogger does and more between the chair and keyboard on Google's search division.

At least I know that Google won't enact any retribution on PC, because they'd have to FIND IT FIRST, and they've already proven they can't do that.

False Positives

There are times when I really really dislike bots and web crawlers.

This is what I discovered when I looked at the results for the past week on Blogger:

Observed on November 20, 2025.

As you can see, the number of people who actually read my last post is around 29, which is on the low end but it hovers typically between 20-50 views. I'm used to that.

But look at the numbers for the site as a whole, and things are a wee bit out of whack.

Almost all of that I can attribute that to bots and crawlers, as it gives the false impression that people are swarming all over the blog. If they were, I'd expect to see more comments this past week than I have.

This stuff comes in waves, so we're in yet another wave that'll likely end around Black Friday. 

EtA: The number of views were originally 22, but by the time I got to a screencap they were 29. Corrected in the post.

Under the Heading of "Things I Didn't Ask For"

There's an AI "Google Search" button right next to this post as I'm typing, and it floored me so much I took a screencap just to prove that it's there:

I even stopped typing to do this, and I realized
my writing made no sense because I was so discombobulated
by it all. (This was observed on October 7, 2025.)

I kid you not.

Anyhoo, here's the original thing I noticed when I popped up Blogger today this afternoon*

On October 7, 2025.

Under the header of "Who asked for this crap?", I was almost instantly annoyed by this new Blogger "feature". 

How about Widgets that are kept up to date, or you can put YouTube Channels (or other social media (tm) channels) into your blog without having to figure out the arcane systems on your own?

Or, in my case, how about bringing my freaking blog into Google Search itself? You know, the thing you tout as the best search engine on the internet?

But noooo... We get an option to add Google Search and Google Search links and previews to our blogs, thus creating "a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google".

Right. Because long form writing needs to be turned into something more "engaging". (As in... "shorter".)

/sigh

*I was not home for part of the day, taking my mom's car in for maintenance.

Still More Technical Silliness

An addendum on my post on Tuesday...

Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.

I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools...

Google's Search Console...

I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.

Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".

This came in on September 24, 2025.

Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.

/sigh

Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:

This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025.

And mobile as of 9/25/2025.
Note the comment about redirect in the listing.

I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:

As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025.

Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up. 

Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.

It'll do for the time being.

However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...

Well, I like it...

Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.

How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

NOTE: This is the correct widget, not the one
originally posted here.

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.

EtA: Corrected the "Feed" widget with the "Subscription Links" widget, which is the actual widget used. 

How to Vanish in Plain Sight

I'd noticed that Google's search engine isn't as good as it used to be for quite a while now, but I wasn't expecting this. 

Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google. 

Don't believe me?

I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.

Here's Google's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

And Bing's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...

As of September 2, 2025.

In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.

I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:

Again, as of September 2, 2025.

***

My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.

I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.

Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:

As of September 2, 2025.

So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it. 

Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in
Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible.
IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes
in the episode so he was temporarily blind.

From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.

I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades. 

*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.

**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator".