Industry News

This is a highly opinionated piece (nothing wrong with that!) and I think there’s some nuance needed, but in general I like these principles from How To Ship Fast. This one is definitely a hot take, but in a dream world where everything is perfect I would agree:

Time spent on prioritization is the canary in the coal mine for not being close enough to your customers. The discrete task of prioritization should take almost no time. Only work on Important things. Sort those Important things...

The Google November 2023 reviews update, the last one Google will confirm, finished rolling out yesterday afternoon on December 7, 2023. It took 29 days to roll out, which initially kicked off on November 8, 2023.

Google announced its latest AI advancements named Gemini yesterday, calling it the most capable AI models yet. It is already baked into Bard and it is being tested in SGE, the Search Generative Experience.

Microsoft has announced a new search feature to Bing Search named Deep Search. Deep Search is an "enhancement" to Bing Search that provides "deeper and richer exploration of the web," but it is slow. Also, Microsoft announced several improvements to Copilot, formerly known as Bing chat.

Last week we reported on the early signs of big Google Search ranking volatility, fluctuations, chatter within the search results. We just don't know if that was related to the ongoing November 2023 reviews update, tremors from the recently completed November 2023 core update or something new and unrelated to those two updates.

Great post by April Dunford on how marketing teams and sales teams need to tell different stories about a product:

Our goals in marketing are very different from our goals in a sales situation. Often in marketing, we are simply trying to capture an audience’s attention and get their permission to continue marketing to them. […] Sales, on the other hand, is generally dealing with the folks who have already raised their hand in some form and are in a purchase process. Our primary job in...

I love Tracy Durnell’s blog—it’s been in my RSS reader for a long time. In Building community out of strangers she makes a case for personal sites to be more… personal.

I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip...

My work at Jeli so far has given me a new lens on “incidents”—both in the software world and beyond—that I didn’t have before. These “failures” are everywhere around us. But are they really failures? Or are they ways for us to learn more about the systems we work within, and how to improve them? I think it’s the latter, and My $500M Mars Rover Mistake by Chris Lewicki is another story that showcases that…

The core lesson I’ve drawn from my rover ordeal is best expressed in these words:...

I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that we now have brain scan research that shows that Zoom fatigue is a real thing:

The brain and heart readings suggested that videoconferencing led to significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, drowsiness, and negative feelings, as well as less attention and engagement, than a face-to-face lecture. The questionnaires also showed the volunteers felt significantly more tired, drowsy, and fed up and less lively, happy, and active from...

20 years ago tomorrow (December 2, 2003), I started this blog aimed at archiving some of the best discussions within the search marketing community...