Industry News

Google surprised most of us with a new core update being announced yesterday, only a week after the November 2024 core update finished rolling out. This new December 2024 core update will take about two weeks to roll out and seems to be a normal core update that is updating one of the core systems that may have not been updated in the November release.

Google held its Google Search Central Live event at its large Zurich office (where the Search Central team is based) and one of the things presented was that Google will be having more core updates, more often. So I guess instead of the three or four core updates Google announces per year, Google may have more of them per year.

Google Ads is beta testing its new AI tools to generate reports by asking Google for the report you want. You enter a prompt, or just a normal English request, and Google Ads will generate a report based on your request.

Google Lens stopped working for all users for a short period of time yesterday morning (NY time). Google confirmed the issue at 9:46am ET on Thursday, December 12th and then within the hour, they mitigated the issue.

Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, confirmed that campaign-level negative keywords are now in beta for Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads. She added that this will expand in 2025 to more accounts.

Several weeks ago, Google announced it would test changes to the search results for hotels in order to see how the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe would impact hotels. Well, that test is wrapped and the results were not good for hotels, says Google.

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 is testing using Gemini 2.0 to power AI Overviews. Apple released Apple Intelligence upgrades...

Google announced its "new AI model" named Gemini 2.0 and with that confirmed Google has begun testing using Gemini 2.0 to power AI Overviews in Google Search. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said the improved AI Overviews can "tackle more complex topics and multi-step questions, including advanced math equations, multimodal queries and coding."

Google Ads is testing a new asset type named video. It seems Google may be testing allowing advertisers to add video assets to their search ads and other Google Ads campaigns.

Apple released a ton of new Apple Intelligence features yesterday, including what I've been waiting to play with - Apple Visual Intelligence. It seems, at least for now, that Apple Visual Intelligence works with ChatGPT and Google Search but I was not able to trigger it for Apple Maps like the initial demo showed.