Industry News

Bing Search has a new refine your search box that sends searchers from Bing Search to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). You can check off the topics below and then click on the blue "chat" button to be taken into Copilot.

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 has completed the rollout of the March 2024 spam update after a 14-day and 21-hour period. This update started on March 5, 2024, and was completed on March 20, 2024. Remember, the March 2024 core update is still rolling out and will do so for the next couple of weeks.

In November we were expecting to see parts of the new Yahoo Search soon but at this point, we have not seen it yet. Brian Provost, the Senior VP and General Manager of Yahoo Search, said on X last night that we should hang tight, the team is still wiring up some new stuff.

Google is once again investigating issues with recipe images and other images not showing for some sites within the Google Search results. We reported on several issues with recipe sites several weeks ago and it seems to be happening again for some of these sites.

The days after the Google March 2024 spam and core updates were released, Google issued tons of manual actions. They were mostly pure spam manual actions that resulted in all or parts of a website being deindexed for violating Google's search spam policies, as Google calls it. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit have not recovered yet.

Joy Hawkins shared a very unusual bug with Google Maps where it places businesses with different addresses in the same location in the same map pin area. It just drops these map pins in one address when they are not located by that map pin.

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

Google has removed the phone number for the hotel panel and hotel panels in the search results. To be clear, the normal local listings, like pizza shops and so forth, do have the phone numbers but not the hotel listings for some reason.

Google is testing more polls and feedback forms within its search results. We spotted a "How helpful was the result above?" and "Does this interest you?" feedback feature in the Google SGE and Google News results.