Industry News

I’ve been knee deep in hard sci-fi stories like Red Mars and Babylon’s Ashes over the past few months, so I have a special affinity for stories about space colonization at the moment. David H. Grinspoon’s The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet is a really interesting take on the ethics of colonizing a new planet:

Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot “conquer” a planet, even if — especially if — it is your home and your life support system. If we...

Yesterday, during the AMA with Google session at SMX West, Google's Gary Illyes may have confirmed the Fred algorithm update that targeted low value content on March 7th/8th...

Several days ago, rumors started surfacing on Twitter that a former Google representation, a senior one, is now playing for the other team - spamming the search engine. Of course, no names were released but supposedly...

The Economist has an in-depth and very interesting feature about people1 who forego regular employment to live with their parents and play video games instead. The kicker that Escape to another world closes with is quite something…

A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while...

Spoilers abound so proceed with caution, but Rogue One: an ‘Engineering Ethics’ Story is so very good:

What Galen Erso does is not simply watch a system be built and then whistleblow; he actively shaped the design from its earliest stages considering its ultimate societal impacts. These early design decisions are proactive rather than reactive, which is part of the broader engineering ethics lesson of Rogue One.

The exploration of how Galen didn’t just walk away but took an...

Museums, musicians, movies, sports teams and sports leagues are now being given a special area for their content to appear in Google’s search results, through an expansion of the “Posts by Google” program.

Posts by Google — more commonly called Google Posts — launched last year as an experimental way for selected groups to post information directly on Google’s servers, which in turn appeared in a dedicated area of Google’s search results for relevant queries.

Google Posts originally...

Google has been very quiet about what SEOs have been calling the "Phantom update." The Phantom update has been floating around for the past couple years now, and we've covered it multiple times here. In fact...

Last week, Google got in trouble, mostly in the EU regions, for allowing their ads, including AdSense, YouTube ads and other display ads, to show up on sites that have "hateful, offensive and derogatory content...

Late Friday afternoon, Google announced they are changing the behavior of how close variants works in Google AdWords. Google said "over the coming months weâre expanding close variant matching to include additional rewording and reordering for exact match keywords...

DMOZ — the Open Directory Project — officially closed today. The move comes three days later than originally planned. It marks the end of an era of humans trying to catalog the entire web.

DMOZ was a project designed to organize the web using volunteer human editors and born during a time when a rival to the dominant Yahoo Directory was seen as needed. Nearly 19 years later, neither directory lives, with machine-powered search engines having made them archaic.

For more background, see...