Industry News

Microsoft has confirmed it is working on bringing filtering capabilities to the Bing Webmaster Tools performance reports. Right now, there is no way to add a filter for any of the metrics in the report. Of course, you can download the data and do what you want with it, but there is no native filter box in the reporting interface.

Google Search is testing asking searchers to sign in to verify they are humans and not bots conducting the searches. I don't think Google has done this before, geneally when Google tries to verify human versus bot activity, Google will serve a captcha and has done so for many years. But this test is asking the searcher to sign in.

Google Trends now lets you compare up to 400 search terms across 8 groups of terms and up to 50 terms in each group. Previously, it was 125 search terms across 5 groups of terms and up to 25 terms in each group. That is a 220% increase, if my math is correct.

Microsoft will be retiring the Bing Webmaster Tools SOAP/POX APIs on August 31, 2026. If you use these legacy APIs you should begin to migrate to the JSON/HTTP (REST) API version.

If you try to filter you Google Search or Google News tab results by the recent search tools option, it simply won't work. If you try to select the "Tools" and then "Recent" options, including the past hour option, it won't listen to that filter and it won't filter the content by the last hour.

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

This week, yep, we had more ongoing Google Search volatility but a calming period on Wednesday. Google has rolled out the platform properties to track X, YouTube...

Microsoft Advertising is moving its Predictive Matching targeting option to Search term matching within AI Max. Microsoft added a note to various help document pages about the change, it says:

In the latest Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller from Google said that it is no longer in the Google Guidelines, now Google Search Essentials, that you must block Google from accessing your internal search results pages. He added that you likely should continue to do so because it can lead to (a) intense server load and (b) quality issues if abused, which can cause Google search ranking issues as a result.

Google Ads may be rolling out a new design for its insights section where it gives you the "Top things to know today." This new interface for this section is in a carousel format, where you can toggle through the various automated insights that Google Ads is providing.