Industry News

Nate Louis noticed that clickable stars were placed next to the keyword list in his Google Ads advertiser console. He can click them to highlight them and unclick them to unhighlight them. He has never seen these before and doesn't know what clicking on them does outside of highlighting them in the list.

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.

Google spoke again about the timing to recover from a helpful content update...

Google seems to be testing removing the side carousel in the SGE, Search Generative Experience, interface. The side carousel generally shows the card answers on the right side of the desktop SGE results. It seems Google is testing not showing those cards on the side panel.

Google has updated, in a big way, its how to "Remove images hosted on your site from search results" help documentation page. Google said, "Part of our ongoing efforts to keep our documentation accurate, we updated the documentation for image removals with more precise language, and addressed some documentation feedback."

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, posted again about the timing around recovering from the helpful content update. He essentially repeated what Google said back when it first was announced, that the classifier is always running to check if content is helpful but it takes time to prove to Google that your efforts are long-term.

When Google first launched SGE, the Search Generative Experience, it would only work in Chrome or the Google Search App on Gmail accounts opted into the search labs experiment. But now when I try accessing SGE while on mobile Safari, the native Apple iPhone browser, it works as well.

Late last week, Google began to roll out those branded Local Service Ads, but it surprised many businesses without a way to opt out of the feature. I am told that Google will provide a way to opt out and will send more details to advertisers this week.

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is a great book about how to improve communication between different cultures when you work at a company with a global workforce. Recently I’ve been thinking about how these concepts apply not just at a (geographical) global level, but within the systems of a single organization. What are the norms of how people communicate with each other in meetings, in email, over Slack? What type of confusion/misalignment might happen because of those norms, and how can it...

This essay on How Group Chats Rule the World (NYT Gift Link) is really great, and I agree with all of it.

The group chat can sustain indefinitely this thin wire of connectedness. Some might argue that this feeling is a deception, another screen-based way to stave off loneliness; I would say instead that it glows with potential. Because there is no practical end to the group chat, it can be a means of keeping the lights on, constellating a set of people who would otherwise be entirely...

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