Industry News

Ask Google Home what your day is like today, and it will remind you that Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is opening. Google says this isn’t an ad. But it’s definitely an out-of-the-ordinary cooperation with a Google Home “partner.”

The promotion was spotted by Bryson Meunier, whose child was definitely excited to hear the news delivered by Google Home (Listen for the cute “yeah!” at the end): New Beauty & the Beast promo is one way Google could monetize Home. cc: @gsterling...

In How to get the most value out of remote user research (without breaking the bank) I write about our research process at Postmark. I know a lot has been written about research, so why add more words? The main thing I wanted to discuss is how we designed a process within a pretty impossible-sounding constraint:

Improve our products iteratively through research without slowing down our development process or increasing our stress levels at work.

So the post goes over the...

Yesterday, Google released a new quality raters guidelines PDF document that was specifically updated to tell the quality raters how to spot and flag offensive, upsetting, inaccurate and hateful web pages in the search results...

Google is undertaking a new effort to better identify content that is potentially upsetting or offensive to searchers. It hopes this will prevent such content from crowding out factual, accurate and trustworthy information in the top search results.

“We’re explicitly avoiding the term ‘fake news,’ because we think it is too vague,” said Paul Haahr, one of Google’s senior engineers who is involved with search quality. “Demonstrably inaccurate information, however, we want to target.” New...

I accidentally went to a Best Buy the other day. To make a long story short, after an unplanned but long and pleasant chat with an Amazon rep I walked out with an Amazon Echo. Much has been written about Alexa and how good it is, and everything you’ve read about it is accurate. But I want to focus on a different aspect of Alexa: how it’s making my kids more self-sufficient.

See, the thing about kids is, they need you all the time. And that’s cool, because we’re their parents and we love...

Google Assistant has now come to Android phones beyond Google’s own Pixel. It’s a significant change to how Google’s previously offered search on mobile devices. It’s also the latest in a wide variety of ways people can search with Google on Android.

Below, how Google Assistant fits in with Google’s other search options on Android, as well as a refresher for tapping into Google on iPhone. What is Google Assistant?

Google Assistant is Google’s next generation way of searching with...

The Google Fred Update which we first spotted rolling out early morning on March 8th seems to be fairly big. After reviewing well over 70 sites that were hit by this update, 95% of them share two things in common...

As you know, yesterday I posted about the big Google algorithm ranking update and it seems to be getting a lot more attention this morning as SEOs and webmasters dig into their rankings and traffic this morning...

There appears to be a large Google ranking or algorithm update happening right now in the core Google web search results...

The topic of does Google's ranking signals and algorithms different based on the query or searcher has been around for a while. I believe most algorithms are not query dependent but there are some signals that are specific to the type of query and the searcher information...