Industry News

Google seems to be rolling out a new Google Lens feature that lets you record with your camera and also speak with your voice on top of that video. Then Google Lens will match the video or image with your spoken text to give you a set of search results or an AI Overview.

Microsoft is testing a weird change to the Bing Search results user experience. Bing is testing that when you do a search from the home page, that it opens the search results in a new window, instead of loading those results on the same tab you are on. Bing is also testing opening a new window for when you click to the next page of the search results.

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 Ads issues credit notices of millions of dollars to individual advertiser by mistake...

Google will begin showing photos in your Local Service Ads that come from your Local Service Ads profile. Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, wrote on X yesterday, "Starting today, we'll begin selecting photos from your LSA profile to show in your ads."

Google is testing sending the searcher to the short videos tab after clicking on the more videos button, instead of dynamically loading videos underneath the videos you are currently looking at in the search results.

Google Ads has released an update it the Google Ads API, version 17.1. Version 17.1 includes shareable ad previews, removing specified automatically created assets linked to Responsive Search Ads, retrieving offline conversion diagnostics, offline diagnostics report metrics, standard bidding strategies for video campaigns, and more.

Google is testing a new label for its search results snippets, this one is named "you may like." I am not sure how Google knows you may like this search result snippet, unless this is a variation of how Google names the "you visit often" label?

Google notified some advertisers last night that they are expected to receive $16 million dollars and $6 million dollars in credits. I am sure others got similar astronomical credit notices. Don't retire anytime soon, it is a bug, and Google will fix the amount if they have not done so already.

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

As part of the DOJ ruling that Google is a monopoly, the document noted that Apple has its own search index and the index size is of billions of websites. The specific number was redacted but it said, "Apple maintains an index of about X billion websites."