Industry News

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.

Now when leaving a review on a business within the Google local and maps results, the disclaimer has a notice about "beta questions." It reads, "For beta questions, your answers may not be displayed publicly during the experiment and may only be visible to you and/or others participating in the experiment. We may delete answers after the experiment."

Google Search is testing a new carousel named "Most-read articles." I guess Google is using click data to see which articles are being read the most. Or maybe Chrome or Google Analytics data? Maybe?

Google Ads is testing a new change history page that shows more details on the changes made to your ads and campaigns. It now documents the change overview by user and by performance as a toggle.

There is a large thread in the Google Analytics help forum with complaints from site owners of being flooded with fake referral traffic originating from Poland. This seems to be the typical referral spam issue and it started around February 17th or so.

The importance of async work and cutting down on meetings to allow for more Deep Work time won’t be new to regular readers of the blog. And yet I can’t resist sharing yet another article about it… How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off has the usual methods and recommendations in it (although “Meeting Rest” is a new one to me—read the article for details).

Instead what I want to focus on here is a few pull quotes about the results companies report once they were able to...

I am seeing some massive volatility being reported today after seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community on Friday. I have not seen the third-party Google tracking tools show this much volatility in a long time. I will say, the tracking tools are way more heated than the chatter I am seeing, so something might be off here.

I’ve been digging into different ways to structure engineering teams a bit, and I like this take on the different roles of Engineering Managers and Engineering Leads:

It became obvious that in most cases it’s too much for one person to manage people (growth, performance and motivation), along with driving technical execution. At the same time, in most teams, we had one or more senior developers on whom Tech Lead could rely and delegate architecture decisions, quality, mentorship, etc… We...