Industry News

Both Google and Microsoft Bing are testing hover effects that will bold elements of the search results. Google is testing bolding the description of the snippet and Bing is testing bolding the title of the snippet.

Ok I love this story.

I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Wall Kimmerer lately. She tells a story in The Serviceberry that’s become a sort of guiding star for me, about the experience of a linguist who was studying a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest.

“He observes that a hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was...

Great tip!

Convert GitHub repos to markdown with repo2txt, drag into Google AI Studio, and ask questions. Gemini’s massive context window makes it amazing for code comprehension.

The rest of the article goes into Peter’s AI coding workflow. I’ve mostly been using ChatGPT o3 for spec creation, but this is another compelling alternative.

→ My AI Workflow for Understanding Any Codebase

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google has not delivered on performing more core updates...

Over the past two days it has felt like there was some sort of ranking adjustment made in the Google Search organic results. Yea, I know, organic search doesn't send clicks anymore, but they are still ranked and it seems like there was some sort of larger shuffle in those rankings.

A couple of years ago, we covered a report by the NY Times on the ongoing issues with review scams and blackmail. Well, the issue is not gone, despite Google responding to that report. From what I am told, it is still relatively common and our own Bill Hartzer was recently threatened and blackmailed with this over SMS.

Over 6 months ago, a Google search representative said we should all expect more core updates, more often. And in the past six months, we have had only one confirmed Google update, the March 2025 core update.

Google is now showing price tracking widgets at the top of the feed. We've seen products with price tracking markup notifications within the feed but these widget styles may be new.

Google posted a new document on the topic of its AdSense for Search Restricted Access Features (RAFs). Google said, "Starting on August 25, 2025, certain AdSense for Search features have limitations depending on an account's status within the Search Partner Network."

Microsoft is testing italicizing the URLs in the Bing Search results. It is a bit weird to look at and I am not sure why Bing is testing this but they are.