Industry News

Microsoft is testing a "more sources" section within the Bing Search results. This seems to load a different user interface, with long card-shaped search results that you can slide through as a carousel.

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

Some Google Ads MCC, Manager Accounts, are seeing channel performance reporting. This does not seem to have been rolled out to all advertisers yet, but Mike Ryan noticed it was rolling out on some of his MCC accounts.

Google Ads added a new channel control for Demand Gen to show ads in Google Maps. Some advertisers see the ability to select Maps as a placement in Demand Gen.

Google Search has been sending 25 percentage points less traffic to news publishers over the past two years, according to the folks over at Newzdash. In 2023, Google Web Search made up over 51% of traffic from Google surfaces to news publishers; that number is now down to 27%.

Google is testing prefilling the search bar in a new Chrome tab, with teasers to encourage you to search deeper with AI Mode. Google is putting in the search box, "Research a topic," "Write something new," "Ask Google," and "Make a plan."

Have you seen those Google Discover notifications that pop up and seem like news notifications from the Google app but what they do is drive you into Google AI Mode. I find them incredibly annoying, because every time I click on it, I think I am going to a news article but instead, I am given an AI-generated AI Mode answer.

Do you ever listen to a podcast episode and immediately want a summary you could reference later? Not the whole transcript or someone else’s review. Just a concise breakdown of the key points in a format you can scan quickly when you need to remember what was covered.

That’s why I spent the weekend building TL;DL (Too Long; Didn’t Listen). It generates AI summaries from podcast episodes. Why I Made This

Beyond that, there were a few other use cases I kept running into: Catching up on...

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.

We had big Google search ranking volatility over the weekend, likely from the end of the December core update...

Google is testing appending "learn more" links to the end of the Google search ads text. So the Google Ad will have its normal ad description and at the end, Google is testing adding "Learn more" with an arrow to the right, in blue anchor underlined text.