Industry News

It has been just about a year now since Microsoft launched Bing Chat (now known as Copilot) and Bing's market share has only grown less than 1% according to StatCounter. Most of you may not be surprised, since our poll shared shortly after Bing Chat launched had most of you thinking Bing won't gain that much market share from this feature.

Google announced it will be making changes to its search results to comply with the new regulation called the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This will result in some Google vertical search units being removed and third-party comparison site units being added to the search results.

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

A study released by the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany asked if Google Search is getting worse. The 16 page paper, downloadable as a PDF over here says that Google has slightly improved in some areas but there is still a lot of spammy content within Google Search.

Advertisers and agencies seem beyond frustrated by the lack of support from the Google Ads support team. Nicola Agius covered it incredibly well, she said, "Google Ads customer service has plummeted to an unacceptable all-time low, according to search marketers."

A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what is the SEO impact and would the text rank in the search results?

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections] and others don't seem to trigger news boxes.

Microsoft is testing a new style for when someone hovers their mouse cursor over a search result snippet in the Bing Search results. Bing will add a shadow effect to that snippet on hover over.

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...

I am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end of the URL.