Industry News

Over the past few days, Google has come under fire over its autocomplete predictions in Google Search around former President, Donald Trump. In the wake of the issue, Google updated its autocomplete prediction system to make improvements in these cases.

Google Ads lets you set up message assets to click-to WhatsApp for some advertisers. Message assets allow you to configure an ad asset or button with your responsive search ads in Google Ads, these can lead some users to WhatsApp.

Google announced new Performance Max reporting updates and asset generation and image editing expansions. "We're adding asset-level conversion reporting to Performance Max, expanding asset generation to App and Display campaigns, improving image editing and much more," Google wrote.

Google seems to be testing a new search feature named "Hidden gem stores." This shows you shopping and merchant listings from various stores and brands. This does not seem to be the Google hidden gems algorithm, but rather just a fancy title for a search feature box.

Microsoft reported its fourth quarter 2024 earnings and it showed that its search and advertising revenue was up 19%. The last time it was up over 19% in a quarter was 10 quarterly earning reports ago, in Q3 2022.

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.

Google Search Console has a bug with the search appearance filters...

Google's John Mueller repeated advice from a while ago that you should not switch your m-dot URLs to be the canonical URL, even though Google is fully switched over to mobile-first indexing. He said this is just because it is how it is done, how it was done, and switching it on Google's end would cause many large sites issues.

Google has a new Google Ads feature within Google Merchant Center feeds in AI image editor that enables you to import product images from your Merchant Center feeds into your Google Ads account. The images will then be stored and available for use in the Google Ads Asset Library. "You can leverage product images to generate new campaign images using AI-powered image editing in Google Ads," Google added.

Google may be testing a new search ad format named "for your consideration." These ads, at least in the example below, show hotel websites that you can go to to find hotels in the area. This may work for other categories of queries, outside of hotels, but this is the example I see right now.

Google Search may be replacing the heading for "X (Twitter)" posts with "Latest Posts from." This would be a step to removing more X branding from the Google Search results page.