Industry News

This is great advice on providing feedback on docs. This especially resonated:

Before starting, remember that the goal of providing feedback on a document is to help the author. Optimizing for anything else, even if it’s a worthy cause, discourages authors from sharing their future writing. If you prioritize something other than helping the author, you are discouraging them from sharing future work.

→ How to provide feedback on documents.

I love this take on the “10x engineer” phenomenon. Ubuntu (the African concept, not the operating system…) strikes again. “I am because you are.”

Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software. What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own.

→ In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

Robin Sloan discusses Substack, and platforms in general, in another excellent post:

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago.

→ Platform reality

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google updated its service areas business guidelines help document to add "Do not add countries or states as a service area." Google also updated numerous parts of the document.

Google seems to be expanding the feature where they turn off the ability for some local listings, Google Business Profiles, to allow posting reviews. We covered this before during the UK and limited release, where you would get a notice that says "Posting reviews is turned off for this place." But now it seems to be expanding to more regions and businesses.

I am not sure if this is new, to be honest, we saw something super similar in the normal local review summaries about fives years ago with "X people mention [keyword]." Now in the Local Service Ads, they have it where it has this people icon with "Reviews often mention [keyword]."

Google will be ending the ability for hotels to manage their hotel rates by themselves, instead they will need to partner with a central reservation system, Internet booking engine or other partner to manage those rates on Google Search.

Microsoft is testing placing a floating Copilot search box within the Bing Search results page. The aim is to encourage searchers to ask follow-up questions, not in Bing Search, but in Microsoft Copilot.

Google updated the directions interface within Google Search. Now the drive (car icon), trains (train icon) and buses (bus icon) are in expandable menus, as opposed to tabs at the top of the "Get there" search results section.