Industry News

On the surface, Ian Bogost’s Video Games Are Better Without Characters is a nostalgia piece about SimCity:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth,...

Google has reacted to how racist searches can bring up the White House and other locations by promising to extend its “Googlebomb” protection to Google Maps.

Google has apologized for the situation and promised a fix is on the way. From its blog post today:

This week, we had some problems with Google Maps, which was displaying results for certain offensive search queries. Like many of you, we were deeply upset by this issue, and we are fixing it now. We apologize this has taken some...

Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design is a great post by Andrew Grimes on the benefits of making users pause and think in certain areas of an interface:

Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement...

We know Google representative can fairly quickly tell if a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty - such as by Penguin or Panda. But when they do it in real time, it is pretty cool...

So after reporting a Google update on May 1st, then waiting and watching the community over the weekend to say - oh boy, there was a Google update rolling out over Friday through the weekend - we then had Google tell us there was no update. I used a Panda bear giving an evil stare because most of us knew something changed.
And Google, after a bunch of arm twisting, finally gave me/us confirmation, which I posted on Search Engine Land.

In a recent Google+ Hangout with Google's John Mueller, someone asked "Are you working on a Panda update or data refresh...

The deal between Google and Twitter to bring more tweets into Google’s search results announced earlier this year is finally delivering on its promise. Google is now showing tweets in a new and more graphical way on mobile devices, with desktop promised soon. Tweets With Images

Both Twitter and Google shared the news in blog posts today, with examples. Below, here’s our own example of how it looks for a search on #iZombie. There’s a “carousel” of tweets at the top of the page, where many...

Over the past couple weeks, I have been seeing more and more webmasters complaining about their rich snippets disappearing from the Google search results page...

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is to compete with Amazon and eBay by offering a new ad model to enable advertisers to let Google be their shopping site, where you click buy now and checkout directly at Google...

A recently granted Google patent explains how Google may find and recommend locations for people to take pictures at. It describes how it might use something like Google Now to recommend “photogenic locations to visit.” The patent tells us: The...