Industry News

John Mueller from Google once again addressed the topic of sites using the Google Indexing API when Google does not officially support those use cases. He said it is not supported first, and he added that these sites are often spammy and low quality - but he stated, "it's great to see passionate people try to do more with it."

Google will change how it estimates its delivery times through Google Merchant Center. Starting on April 9, Google will look at minimum [min_handling_time]and maximum [max_handling_time] attributes for processing time in your product data for Shopping ads and free listings.

Google has posted a new policy for Google Merchant Center around using AI-generated images. In short, you need to make sure those images have meta data that labels the image as generated by using AI.

Google has always shown how expensive restaurants are by placing either one, two, or three dollar signs by the restaurant's name in the local pack listings. Now Google is testing showing actual price ranges.

Google Search is experimenting with a Pixel phone feature that will let you call a customer service line at a company and wait on hold until a real person answers the phone. This is currently a Search labs feature that will let you click a button in search to "request a call" from a "live representative."

Google announced this morning support for Product variant structured data. This new structured data supports three new properties; hasVariant, variesBy and productGroupID in order to handle most of the way e-commerce sites list product variants.

Here’s Lorin Hochstein with another great post about the practice of learning from software incidents. He asks, What if everybody did everything right?

An alternative lens for making sense of an incident is to ask the question “how did this incident happen, assuming that everybody did everything right?” In other words, assume that everybody whose actions contributed to the incident made the best possible decision based on the information they had, and the constraints and incentives that...

I know there was a different The Cut essay that got more attention recently, but The Lure of Divorce is the one I actually read all the way through. A heartbreaking and beautiful story, so well written.

I didn’t read any of the internet commentary on it, but apparently it wasn’t great (shocking!). John Warner’s take on it resonates with me:

I have some things to say about the disturbing tendency of some readers to respond to attempts at interesting and true expression by leading with...

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

Google is investigating a possible issue with its search results where Google is not ranking adult-oriented sites for its brand name in some regions. Instead, Google ranks the adult site's help and support section above the home page for its name.