Industry News

Google Search changed how many stories it shows for political figures recently. Now Google shows the two by two top stories grid in search for searches on Harris, Trump and other political figures. Google use to show 7 top stories formats for these figures.

Google has confirmed it is testing more than 10 ads (some 18) in the Google Shopping ad box. Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, said "This is a small experiment exploring different configurations for shopping ads to promote greater discovery."

Summer's going by rather fast, but one event that's already come and gone has been this year's edition of Google's PE Summit for the EMEA region. It took place on June 20th and 21st in Zürich, Switzerland, and was hosted at Google's own offices as well as in a virtual format, similar to previous years.

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.

The US is considering breaking up Google as a remedy to it being a monopoly...

US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google, out of Bloomberg last night was the big business news from yesterday. How would Google be broken up? Well, they would diversify Android and Chrome and potentially try to force Google to sell "AdWords," they mean Google Ads.

I am hearing reports of some spammers or hackers hijacking some Google Hotel listings by marking some hotels as permanently closed and also changing the phone numbers to WhatsApp numbers. This can be a huge concern for many hotel operators, but I am not sure how widespread the issue is.

We keep trying to understand if Google Search will change, if it will just be AI Overviews or if the change will be more drastic. Well, Google demoed Gemini Research, where Google uses AI to do your research, by curating information across the web to build a document that gives you a detailed researched answer.

When Google announced the new Google Search Console recommendations, one of the examples of the recommendations was to bulk export your data because "Search Console only shows 35% of your performance data." Now, this is not new, we knew Google anonymized way too much of your data in Search Console, but now Google is showing how much in this example report.

Apple Business Connect has added a new feature named Showcase enhancements. A "Showcase" allows you to share up-to-date information with your customers, like seasonal items or promotions. Apple extended these showcases for longer periods and more characters.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...