Industry News

I really don’t know how much more data we need about this. It’s almost as if RTO is not about productivity at all…

Bloom and Han reported last week in the journal Nature that, over the subsequent two years, hybrid workers showed no difference in performance grades or promotion prospects compared to office-bound colleagues; the company’s computer engineers, for example, did not differ in their coding output across the two groups.

Hybrid workers, however, reported higher job...

Some solid points in this article from Jason Knight. On product-led vs. sales-led (but could also refer to engineering-led) organizations:

To be honest, my strong opinion is that if you have to worry about who’s “leading” anything, then you’ve got bigger problems to worry about than who’s leading. If your entire company is aligned around what’s important and how to get there, then anyone could “lead” you there. This is supposed to be a collaboration, not a dictatorship. If one team...

This is a fun bit of gaming history:

The thing about games, particularly Japanese games, is that they exist in a symbiotic relationship with manga and anime. When I spoke to Uemura-san, the engineer of the NES, he said ‘Once hardware developed to the point where you could actually draw characters, designers had to figure out what to make. Subconsciously they turned to things they’d absorbed from anime and manga. We were sort of blessed in the sense that foreigners hadn’t seen the things...

Emma Sarappo has a fascinating review of a new book about the Challenger space disaster (gift article). It is the first global disaster I was old enough to witness and experience in real time, and I’ve never been able to get those images out of my head. This review (and book) shines a horrifying light on the many human failures (mainly due to hubris) that resulted in this tragedy:

These issues—faulty O-rings, foam strikes—were understandable. Theoretically, with study and ingenuity, they...

As you know, Google Search Console's performance reports were significantly delayed this week. But as of this morning, the reports are beginning to catch up. Google said last night it would take them "at least 2-3 days to fully catch up" and reprocess the data. So if you are seeing weird data, look away and come back on Monday.

Today being July 4th, I normally would avoid writing stories here but there are a lot of rumors out there that Reddit is blocking Google Search from crawling and indexing its content. It is not true - Reddit is not blocking Google Search.

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.

The Google Search Console delays do not mean there is an unconfirmed core update rolling out...

Another rumor coming out of the Google Search Console reporting delays is that this is some sort of unconfirmed update is rolling out. Well, that is not the case at all. John Mueller of Google said this is not a core update or even an unconfirmed core update.

Rand Fishkin has come out with his 2024 edition of the Google zero click study and it shows that in the US, zero clicks are now at 58.5%, which is down from 65% in 2021. The study says about 37% of Google searches lead to no action, 21.4% lead to another Google search and 41.5% lead to a click.

Google Search has a new shopping-related carousel named "current styles." This shows up for some shopping-related queries, and if you search for a product, it might show you style variations that may be trending.