Industry News

There are reports that the filetype operator within Google Search has stopped working, it has not. It doesn't work when you add additional search operators to it, like a site command to see a specific file type on a specific type. Google has said it is likely a bug and they are working on bringing it back.

A week ago, I had several people notify me that the news tab in Google Search was missing. I checked using multiple browsers and devices and I saw the news tab, so I thought it was a quick bug that was resolved. Then, days later, Nieman Labs reported that Google tested removing the news tab, although I am not 100% sure if that is true.

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's local pack dropped the ability to see more results...

Google Search may have a bug in the European regions with hotel listings being hijacked by spammy sites. Google will show TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, Booking.com and other legit sites in its search results but when you click on those listings, you're taken to a different site, a spammy site.

Google Analytics seems to have added a new default Google Ads report to the performance reporting section. This is if you have linked your Google Analytics 4 profile with your Google Ads account.

Google Ads now will use colors, like yellow and red background highlights, for the "limited by budget" status column. I assume a yellow indicator color is not as limited as a red indicator color.

Google has dropped the "more places," "view all" and links to see more local results from the local pack, the places box, in the Google Search results. This happened last night around 5 pm ET, and I thought it was a bug, but so far, Google has not yet fixed the issue.

According to a court filing by Google, Microsoft tried to sell Bing, its search engine, to Apple but Apple did not want it because of search quality issues and lack of investment. Plus, Microsoft pitched Apple to make Bing the default search engine but that was rejected as well.

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

Last week, Google revealed it signed a deal with Reddit to access its content using an API so it can get the content faster and in a structured format. This deal costs Google $60 million annually. There is now speculation that Google might make a similar deal with Quora.