Industry News

The big Google Ads reporting outage from the eve of August 1st was an intentional outage due to Google serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts. This was not just an ad spend issue but also a privacy and data issue for Google advertisers. But don't worry, Google will issue credits to the "small fraction of advertisers" that were impacted by this.

Google Trends began rolling out a new design for the trending now page a day or so ago. The new design seems to give you more filter options and provide more keyword data on the same page.

Google is testing the "see also" carousel on Google Business Profiles. This means, someone can be looking directly at your local listing on Google, maybe because they searched for your company name, and Google can be suggesting competitors right under your listing.

Judge Amit Mehta, a US federal judge ruled on Monday that Google is a monopoly. "Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Judge Mehta wrote in his 286-page filing (PDF).

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

Microsoft looks to have pushed out a Bing Search ranking algorithm update around May 29th. I don't track Bing Search ranking volatility that closely anymore but Glenn Gabe looked back at some data and believes that around May 29, 2024, there was a big Bing core update (if you will). Fabrice Canel from Microsoft responded by saying, no, "nothing unusual was released around this date."

Google seems to know handle or obey the RateLimit Header Fields for HTTP. Mike Blazer asked John Mueller from Google about this and John said he never heard of it, so he assumes Google Search does not handle it.

Google has dropped the title from the "see results about" disambiguous search feature in the mobile search results interface. The feature is still very much alive, but on mobile search, Google removed the title of it and just shows the feature. On desktop, the title of the search feature remains.

Google seems to be showing photos from reviews from actual users in the Google Shopping product image carousel. So when you click on a product listing and then swipe through the images, you may see actual photos submitted by users from their reviews.

Google seems to have launched the interactive knowledge panel layout for local knowledge panels in Google Search. This design is from a couple of years ago but now seems to be rolling out for the local version of knowledge panels.