Industry News

Yesterday Bing announced at SMX West that they have increased the ability to submit URLs to their search engine by 1,000X from 10 URLs per day to 10,000 URLs per day. They also said this is a fundamental shift in how search engines discover content and reduce crawling of web sites.

Web agency Postlight wrote about their engineering culture, and what a breath of fresh air it is to read this list in the midst of the current “hustle til you drop” culture:

The positivity of our internal communication fosters a team that is warm and easy to engage with for our clients. Our clients are shocked by how easy it is to communicate with our engineers. No knee-jerk reactions. Just a friendly, two-way, conversation with professionals.

Or, as we phrase it in our Wildbit...

Yesterday at SMX West, I did a panel named Man vs Machine covering algorithms versus guidelines and during the Q&A portion, I asked the Bing reps Frédéric Dubut and Nagu Rangan what percentage of the core ranking algorithm is AI or machine learning based. To my surprise, they guessed over 90%.

It’s a bit of an uneven piece, but Peter Krmpotic’s What’s the Secret to Becoming a Great Product Manager? makes some good points about ego vs. customer focus:

The ultimate goal for product managers and product leaders is to instinctively focus on the customer and not their own egos. This is hard since it is natural to be self-centered and unnatural to be customer-centric.

In Scott Belsky’s recently published book “The Messy Middle”, he highlights how we are hardwired to...

Very interesting article by Anab Jain arguing for More than Human-Centered Design. We need to move beyond ourselves and consider the things around us:

Interdependence is a powerful concept for me: different participants—human and non-human—are emotionally, economically, ecologically or morally interdependent on each other. And this reliance is acknowledged. I think this perspective is something that would be very meaningful for many of us to consider—whether we’re interaction,...

I imagine that if you made one of those pull-string dolls of a Product Manager, it would just say “Why?” over and over1. We love figuring out the real reason behind an idea or a customer problem — as we should. But I think we often miss an important follow-up question: “Why now?”

We have so many methodologies for prioritizing problems and features, but I’ve found that this one question is able to cut through all the complex reasoning and (rightfully) stop unneeded projects in their...

I reported on Friday that Google will be deprecating some or all of the old Search Console features so they can focus more on the new Google Search Console. Well, Google made it official by posting a blog post on the news on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Last night in the Google NYC event John Mueller said Google is currently aiming to deprecate most, if not all, of the old Search Console by March of this year. That timeline may change but that is the goal. With that some features in the old Search Console are going away, some will have replacements, some will not.

This is a good summary of the “healthy pressure” we strive towards on our team as well:

While working without the pressure of explicit deadlines can feel liberating, it also increases the chance of distraction. Deadlines help us stay focused, aligned and driven – and can be used to keep project scope in check.