Industry News

For years Google has been testing placing the URL at the top of the search result snippet. Google also has been testing favicons near the URL as well for years. Google has also been testing a black ad label. Now it is officially all live in the main mobile search results. And guess what, many in the SEO community believe it was done to confuse the searcher into thinking the ads are organic results.

Yesterday we were the first to report that Google was having an issue indexing the web. Google then confirmed the issue a couple of hours later. It seemed it was resolved around 1pm ET yesterday. Google has confirmed two hours ago that it was indeed resolved.

There may be a serious Google bug or it might just be a interface issue - I am not sure - but if you try to find recent content indexed by Google - Google won't be able to help you out. If you try to search for content in the past hour or so from sites like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or almost any site, you will be out of luck.

This is a helpful article from Jeff Vincent about the “nth user problem”. This is a not-so-great term for a very real problem: how to make sure you’re able to effectively onboard additional team members on a customer’s primary account. From SaaS has an nth user problem:

A huge driver of churn in the most successful SaaS businesses is loss of champion churn — or when your product’s greatest advocate within a customer company moves on to another job or department and the replacement...

Image Classification in the past

Back in 2008, I was writing about how a search engine might learn from photo databases like Flickr, and how people label images there in a post I wrote called, Community Tagging and Ranking in Images of...

Casey Winters takes the product/market fit model further in his post Feature/Product Fit:

Every product team tries to make their core product better over time. But sadly, at most companies, the process for this is launching new features and hoping or assuming they are useful to your existing customers. Companies don’t have a great rubric for understanding if that feature is actually valuable for the existing product. This process should be similar to finding product/market fit, but...

The last time Google updated the search quality raters guidelines was in July 2018. On May 16, 2019 Google pushed out an updated version of the search quality raters guidelines used by humans hired as consultants to review both the live and test Google search results, aimed at giving feedback to Google's search engineers to make improvements to the Google search algorithms.

I always love reading about IDEO’s process. In his post To Transform Your Industry, Look at Someone Else’s Owen Sanderson explains the concept of analogous research: a form of exploration that takes a team outside of its industry to find inspiration in the ways others have tackled similar challenges. He explains how they took some hospital staff to an airport to observe the customer experience:

We started at check-in. The hospital team was issued mock boarding passes and asked to...

The Buzzfeed News article Behind Twitter’s Plan To Get People To Stop Yelling At Each Other is not the kind of thing I usually link to here, but I found it really fascinating from a product management perspective. Author Nicole Nguyen goes deep into the research and development process of the team responsible for “twttr” — an external, public prototype to experiment with new features. The sections that give us insight into the thinking of Sara Haider (Director of Product Management) and Lisa...