Industry News

I had a few interesting topics to write about this week, but none of them seemed meaty enough to spawn a full-fledged article on their own. So I decided to throw them all out there with a little bit of commentary to go with them. I hope some of them resonate with you!

As you know, Google announced their Hummingbird algorithm about a month after it launched, claiming no one noticed and no one should notice. But we do think we did notice but no one can confirm that outside of Google and they won't...

Dr. Drang did some iPhone battery calculations and concludes as follows in The small improvement in iPhone battery capacity:

It’s no secret that Apple has taken pains to make iPhones more and more stingy with power. What I didn’t appreciate until I put this table together was that the ability to still get a day of use out of an iPhone is due almost entirely to improvements in all the non-battery hardware and the software that drives it.

There have been a lot of complaints about...

Hurray! Google has added TV episode listings to its search results, the company announced today. What’s not to like? Perhaps that they don’t work as well as they could and are disappointing compared to what Google’s TV listings are like within Google TV. You remember Google TV, right? Google Search: Now With TV Episodes

Google shared the TV listing news on Google+ today, saying: Now when searching for your favorite TV shows, you can get more information about specific episodes. For example,...

I don’t know when it happened, but it seems we’ve reached a tipping point where most tech articles now take their titles out of the BuzzFeed playbook. That said, Christopher Mims’ Everything you know about Steve Jobs and design is wrong, according to one man who should know is quite interesting. His review of Hartmut Esslinger’s book Keep It Simple quotes these astute observations about design and corporate culture:

I explained that to make design a core element of Apple’s corporate...

I am a bit late on the monthly Google Webmaster Report recap that I provide every month - but I am going to blame a very busy early of the month.

We had the release of the Google Penguin 2.1 algorithm...

I just got back from a week of Product Management/UX training and consulting in Tehran, Iran. I am still trying to process it all, but I consider it one of the highlights of my career. What I experienced in Iran is so different from what I expected that it feels like I’m dealing with some kind of assumption whiplash that I’ll need quite a bit of time to recover from. But I want to write down my thoughts before I forget some of it, so here goes.

I’d like to use this post to discuss both the...

Late Friday afternoon, Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they unleashed Penguin 2.1.
In short, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said it impacted about 1% of search queries.
Looking at the hundreds of comments on our quick post from Friday and looking at the threads out there in the webmaster and SEO communities, it seems like many many webmasters were impacted by this update.