Industry News

Google has been launching changes to its search results in the European regions to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). We've seen tests of how this will change the search results for some time now but here is a step by step walk through of how the hotel search results changed in the EU.

Bing seems to be testing displaying ads on the left side bar of the Bing Search results. Previously, Bing had organic free listing details on that left side bar but now it seems they are testing showing Microsoft Advertising search ads on that panel.

Google Ads may be testing a new ad format that look more like those perspectives, where the ads are in these tall boxes or cards and those cards are on shaded backgrounds. Have you seen these before?

I’ve been seeing a lot of this type of sentiment about React recently…

By my reckoning, if you’ve maintained a React codebase for the past decade, you’ve re-written your application at least three times and possibly four. […]

By choosing React, we’ve signed up for a lot of unplanned work. Think of the value we could have produced for our users and company if we weren’t subject to the whims of whatever the cool kids were doing over in React.

We already know that actions > words but this is still really interesting research:

Daughters of dads who talked a good talk about gender equality—but who nevertheless didn’t do as much as their partners in terms of domestic labor—had lower career aspirations than daughters of dads who pulled their weight around the house.

This is such a good point about music discovery and the abundance of choice:

Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?

I also like this sentiment:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never...

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

It has been almost 12 weeks since the last confirmed Google search ranking algorithm was released. That was the November 2023 reviews update. Before that was the November 2023 core update. Since then, we have had plenty of unconfirmed updates (or ranking bugs), but none have been confirmed.

Google seems to have launched a new feature for some restaurants to make corrections and updates to the feedback customers leave about their menus and dishes. This feature is called Menu Highlights and you can select an item and submit feedback to Google to let them know if the dish is no longer served or if the name of the dish is not accurate.

A new report says that custom Google Business Profile services also impact rankings, maybe to a lesser degree than normal services. This report was from the folks at Sterling Sky who shared some limited data on the topic.