Industry News

Google is sending mass scale notifications via email and Webmaster Tools warning sites that are not mobile-friendly that it will cause issues for them if they want to rank well for smartphone users.

This is the first time Google is sending these notifications to these webmasters...

I really enjoyed Eddie Smith’s The ascent of failure, a post on the many ways our technology can fail us. He starts off with a parenting story that’s infinitely relatable, and goes on to make some good points about how fiddly we’ve become with our technology:

With Yosemite and iOS 8, we have even more interdependence through features like Handoff. Now, a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad are no longer three things but a system of things—an ecosystem with an even higher chance of failure by...

There are lots of great points in Chris Hardie’s Distributed vs. In-Person Teams, an article on the challenges and opportunities of remote work. But this part, in particular, stood out because I’ve experienced it myself:

Having some remote workers is harder than being fully local or fully distributed. […] This dual approach is probably a recipe for disaster when it comes to building shared vision and common culture in an organization. If there are team members who have a daily...

How many searches does Google handle per day, month or year? The company is notorious for not regularly sharing such figures. But we now know that it remains at least more than one trillion, the first update since Google last shared over two years ago.

A stat in Steven Levy’s excellent story on Backchannel yesterday, How Google Search Dealt With Mobile, said that Google handles over 3 billion searches per day. 1 Trillion Served

It was a rare sighting of a queries-per-day figure...

Google has many updates to their Structured Data Testing Tool since launching in 2009, including renaming it in 2012 but yesterdays update may be one of the larger updates.

Earlier this week, we reported on many Google AdSense publishers claiming some Google AdSense ads were auto-redirecting users from their their site to a spammy site...

I just posted another excerpt from Making It Right to Medium. It’s called How to avoid building products that fail, and it’s all about starting the product development process at the right place:

When it comes to building products, the starting point is — always—needs. Not what we assume would be cool, but what users or the business need to be successful. […] One of the biggest mistakes we can make in product development is jumping to execution before an appropriate planning cycle has...

Dave Pell in a short note about music streaming, radio, and high-res audio:

I’m at the tail-end of a pretty severe audio-related midlife crisis (related: Anyone want to buy some vinyl?) and I’m convinced that the return to Vinyl and the quest for audio excellence has less to do with sound quality and more to do with nostalgia for what listening to music used to be — an often communal activity that required focus and was more than just a soundtrack for whatever else you happened to be...

This morning, Google posted on Google+ a request for webmasters to submit their ideas and suggestions on how to improve Google Web Search and Google Webmaster Tools.
Google said that

The other day a friend emailed me asking if I’d ever seen behavior where Google’s autocomplete suggestions would change based on a prior query.



I’ve seen search results change based on prior queries but I couldn’t recall the autocomplete suggestions changing in the way he detailed. So I decided to poke around and see what was going on. Here’s what I found. Query Dependent Autocomplete Example

Here’s the example I was sent. The individual was cleaning up an old computer and didn’t...