Industry News

Google is testing a new "share list" button for local packs, place results, in the Google Search results. I assume this lets you share the local listings you see with a friend or colleague.

Google has combined the marketing email preferences within Google AdSense, which may lead to you getting more emails from the Google AdSense team. Google merged the "Customized help and performance suggestions" and "Periodic newsletters with tips and best practices" email lists into one.

One can always find weird bugs in the Google and Bing Search results but these two really caught my eye. Bing Search seems to have a bug for some searchers where the URL in the search result snippet is being cut off. And Google might have a bug that leads to way too much white space between search result snippets.

Google is no longer showing the price of Bitcoin when you search for it in Google Search. Google's VP, Engineering for Search, Rajan Patel, said this is "Not intended" and he will investigate the issue.

When Andrew Liptak writes about Lord of the Rings, I pay attention. This is one of his best yet, drawing a line from Tolkien to our present-day world in an incredible way:

A critical theme throughout Tolkien’s work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors.

But we should not despair:

Tolkien isn’t throwing up his hands and pointing out that the world is terrible: he’s explaining that there are ways to...

Interesting theory by Casey Newton that good Design helped Deepseek to become popular so quickly:

Both models “thought” for about 13 seconds. ChatGPT showed me a handful of two- or three- word snippets to tell me what it was doing during this time: “comparing protocols,” for example. For the most part, though, I was in the dark about what it was up to.

DeepSeek, on the other hand, shared more than 500 words about its process. I found it disarmingly humble. “Let me start by recalling...

Interesting theory by Casey Netwon that good Design helped Deepseek to become popular so quickly:

Both models “thought” for about 13 seconds. ChatGPT showed me a handful of two- or three- word snippets to tell me what it was doing during this time: “comparing protocols,” for example. For the most part, though, I was in the dark about what it was up to.

DeepSeek, on the other hand, shared more than 500 words about its process. I found it disarmingly humble. “Let me start by recalling...

I like this idea from Lorin Hochstein about focusing more on the almost-incidents in our products:

Because most of our incidents are novel, and because near misses are a source of insight about novel future incidents, if we are serious about wanting to improve reliability, we should be treating our near misses as first-class entities, the way we do with incidents.

I imagine that a culture of “post near-incident reviews” could be really beneficial for the resiliency of our...

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

Yep, we are seeing more Google search ranking volatility mid-week. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for February. Google Ads has a new quality update that accounts for user navigation experience...