Industry News

Yesterday I posted somewhat of a sarcastic post on Google teasing us with more Search Analytics data again...

Kate Bowler’s Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me is the best thing I’ve read this year so far. It’s funny, sharp, and deeply moving. Kate recently got cancer, some time after writing an academic book on the prosperity theology phenomenon in many American churches. Prosperity theology—the idea that “good” faith in God can make you rich and keep you healthy—is an immensely damaging philosophy, and Kate addresses this with poise and clarity.

I hesitate to quote anything from the essay...

Patricia Pisters explores why horror movies are much scarier than they used to be in her essay Neurothriller:

Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary filmmakers not only tap into increased knowledge about the brain offered by neuroscientific experiments, but their films also stimulate the neural senses of emotions without the detour of narrative. […]

But the difference between the classic thriller and the neurothriller is not simply the difference between a narrative-driven...

Katherine Benjamin wrote a fantastic essay on designing for user empowerment, and what that really means. She asks, specifically in the context of digital health, When are we empowering users, and when are we just being lazy?

The World Bank talks about empowerment in terms of two things. Firstly, they talk about enhancing an individual’s capacity to make choices. They then talk about leveraging those choices into desired actions or outcomes. […]

When we think about things like...

All this back and forth on when Google will launch Penguin 4.0 is getting to everyone. Will it be Q1, why wasn't it in January or in 2015...

When everything about your life is out in the open, there is power in keeping some of it secret. The ironic side-effect of social media is that it makes it easier to hide. When people think that you share everything, they don’t expect you to keep anything secret.

I recently went on a brief trip to South Africa to visit family, and I stayed (mostly) off social media. It felt weird—I felt this strange guilt, like I was “hiding” something because so many of my friends didn’t even know I was...

Abby Covert wrote a brilliant and passionate plea for a return to the basic principles of Information Architecture in our design work. From The Pain With No Name:

In too many cases, educational programs in design and technology have stopped teaching or even talking about IA. Professionals in the web industry have stopped teaching their clients about its importance. Reasons for this include “navigation is dead,” “the web is bottom up, not top down,” and “search overthrew structure”—but...

Cliff Kuang makes some interesting points in his essay The Secret UX Issues That Will Make (Or Break) Self-Driving Cars:

Recall that first principle that [Brian Lathrop at Volkswagen] laid out for designing autonomous cars—that the driver has to know whether the car is driving itself. That harks to probably the oldest dictate in interface design; mode confusion causes 90% of airplane crashes, and that insight helped invent the field of human-computer interaction. Think about all the...

For those wondering when Google will release Penguin 4.0, well - I don't have any new information for you. We expected it in 2015 and the holidays delayed it to 2016... Gary Illyes doesn't know...

Last night, Bill Hartzer spotted that the link operator, i.e. [link:www.seroundtable.com] no longer returns results. Well, he is right, for some domains but for others, it does seem to work.



But for sites like [link:searchengineland.com] it does work:



In short...