Industry News

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.

Google Search Console has a bug with the Search Performance report, where if you want to filter by Search Appearance, it won't show you all the options. Google is aware of the bug and it should be fixed soon.

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 says the next core update isn't extremely far away...

Google's John Mueller responded to complaints about image thumbnails still not showing up for some publishers in the search results. He encouraged a bit more patience, saying "the next one [core update] isn't extremely far away now, so I'd recommend waiting for that."