Industry News

Microsoft is testing a new local pack design and layout for Bing Search local pack results. Bing is placing these blue boxes, either below the map, to the right side, including different numbered variations.

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

Google looks to have expanded its enforcement of its site reputation abuse policy to European regions this week. Google began enforcement in the US back in May but Google seems to have issued a ton of these manual actions (manual penalties) to European based sites.

Yahoo seems to be testing AI Chat within its search results. The chat feature loads on the right side for your query. You click on it and it loads an AI chat bot.

Google is still testing its offensive page annotation feature in the Google iOS app still, but the good news is that the opt out feature does indeed work. Yes, it takes about a month, but if you opt out, Google will stop showing page annotations on your web pages.

Google has removed the breadcrumb from the mobile search results, leaving only the domain in the search result snippets. The desktop search results will continue to have the breadcrumb and domain in the snippets.

Microsoft is testing a new search filter menu option that lets you filter by real estate results. This shows up in the normal search menu below the search box.

Now when you use Circle To Search in Google, Google can now return AI Overviews to those results. Google said they are "expanding AI Overviews to more kinds of visual search results for places, trending images, unique objects and more."

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

We may be seeing more Google search ranking volatility start to get heated starting this weekend, through January 20th and 21st (and maybe today). Some of the Google tracking tools are having issues tracking these changes but some are not. But I do see a lot of chatter spike in the past couple of days.