Industry News

Do you remember the “One Laptop Per Child” project? The PR event made a huge splash back in 2005, and I remember being really impressed and inspired. As it turns out, OLPC is a textbook example of what happens when an organization has a sincere desire to solve a problem that they simply don’t understand.

Adi Robertson, writing for The Verge, has an excellent history of the project called OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong. It starts with this...

There may be a Google search and ranking algorithm update starting off this morning. I received a couple of notifications via email and some on social media and the chatter in the ongoing WebmasterWorld forums is starting to heat up a bit...

Thi Nguyen’s essay Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a long time. Nguyen argues that echo chambers are very different from what he calls “epistemic bubbles”, and that conflating the two concepts places our focus on the wrong solutions to the problem. In short, the difference is this:

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.


Epistemic...

Google's new guidelines around Job Postings and listings requires that you remove any job postings on your web site that have been filled. If you do not remove the listing...

Earlier this week we reported Google expanded the more results button test to more users, well...

As I covered last night at Search Engine Land, Google has officially expanded the more results button test, which lets a searcher click on "more results" to dynamically load more results in the search results...

I read something recently that struck me as a really good idea for our team. Usually that feeling goes away after a couple of hours (“nah, it’s cool but not a good fit for us”) — but not this time. In Running in Circles, Ryan Singer talks about the knowns/unknowns in a project like a hill:

The most important question for a team isn’t “what is left?” but “what is unknown?” Can you see the edges? Have you gone in there and seen everything that needs to change? The only way to gain...

A core algorithm update, the mobile-first indexing rollout begins, zero search results tested, image search captions...