Industry News

Google is updated its Google Ads third-party policy to add new penalties for third parties, such as PPC agencies, "that enable significant or sustained policy violations." These new penalties include removal from programs, such as Google Partners, and account suspension.

Google is testing angled or off-centered design elements within the search results. The search box seems angled, the favicons seem twisted, the box elements throughout seem tilted - it just seems like an interesting test that should never see the day of light.

Oh my, Justin (from my favorite newsletter platform Buttondown) nails it here:

Customers make for good historians but poor futurists, and certainly they won’t do the hardest and most important job of identifying your leverage points for you.

That was your shot. Here’s your chaser:

None of this is to say you shouldn’t talk to customers: you should! But it should be neither the first nor the last step in your process: if someone needs to talk with people to figure out what to build...

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.

A new video from a famous YouTuber talks about why Google is falling apart...

Arun Maini, a famous YouTuber known for his Mrwhosetheboss channel, posted a scathing video named "Why Google Search is Falling Apart. The video goes through three reasons why Google Search is failing: (1) the results page, (2) SEO, and (3) AI changes.

Google is testing swapping out the normal spelled-out Google logo with the Super G (that is what Google calls it) logo at the top of the Google Search results page. I find it weird but I guess it can work?

Google Ads is rolling out a new campaign setting named Gross profit optimization. The gross profit is calculated by Google by applying the gross profit margins you set up in the gross profit optimization goal to the value of each conversion.

Google is testing showing the term "top links" or "top links from..." in its search results snippets, that seem to give a title to the sitelinks shown under search result snippets. This is shown both on organic free search results and the search ads, Google Ads, in Google Search.

Did you know that Bing removed dozens of features? 27 Bing featured were "unshipped" according to the new CEO of Bing, Mustafa Suleyman, said on X. He wrote, "Simplicity is one of the core principles I am focused on. I am so proud that the Bing team has unshipped 27 features. Being brave enough to undo complexity is important."

This post about news feeds by Lauren Goode at Wired resonated with me a lot:

For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.

I just can’t get comfortable with algorithmic feeds. I know it’s...