Industry News

In the blog post, Searching Google for Big Panda and Finding Decision Trees I tried to guess the identity of the Mysterious “Panda” that a recent (at that time) update was named after, as we had been told in a Wired Magazine Article. I guessed...

Bing announced they will be launching their own version of a mobile friendly algorithm in the upcoming months for the Bing mobile search results.
This is similar to Google's mobile friendly algorithm in so many ways but in Bing's case, they won't be giving a date with this announcement and they are saying relevancy, no matter what, will always be more important than if a site renders nicely on mobile devices.

Shaun McCormick describes Why the way we look at technical debt is wrong:

Technical debt is ok, and often a solid product strategy. The importance is getting to market. When launching a new system or feature, focus your effort and time on areas of the product that need to be agile, and move quickly through areas that don’t. Later, if the product proves that it can drive revenue, you can revisit those areas and improve if they need to scale.

This is an excellent sentiment, and I...

“Mobile first” is more about progressive enhancement and making important design hierarchy decisions than it is about thinking about small screens, so I don’t agree with the “outdated” bit in Paul Adams’s Why ‘mobile first’ may already be outdated. That said, he makes a good point about enterprise software:

Many businesses being advised to go all in on mobile screens, should consider how often they are accessed while people are at work. Software that people probably shouldn’t, but do,...

This post is about a Google patent from a well-known Google Engineer, that describes ranking search query results at an internet search engine, such as Google. Google aims at identifying resources, of different types such as web pages, images,...

We've been covering all the confusion around Penguin and Panda about it being real time or manual. I explained based on covering John Mueller's explanation of what is real time and what is not over here...

Emily Badger wrote a very interesting article on the politics of sunlight and shade in urban design. From In the shadows of booming cities, a tension between sunlight and prosperity:

For cities, shadows present both a technical challenge — one that can be modeled in 3-D and measured in “theoretical annual sunlight hours” lost — and an ethereal one. They change the feel of space and the value of property in ways that are hard to define. They’re a stark reminder that the new growth...

Andrew Thompson in Engineers of Addiction, a fascinating profile on the psychology of slot machines:

Game [slot machine] designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying.

In other words, their job...

Thomas Schranz writes in Product / Market Fit is a Trap:

Obsessing about product/market fit is a huge waste of your time. Yes … waste of your time. There … I said it again. […]

As I said above you don’t want to focus on product/market fit. You want to focus on building a great product and on getting it into the hands of your customers.

First, let’s talk about tone. I’m pretty averse to absolute language like “it’s a trap” and “it’s a waste of time.” Things are rarely that...

It has been a while since we reported on any wide spread, mass scale, Google manual actions but it seems like over the weekend...