Industry News

Here’s a good post from Gergely Orosz discussing Interesting Learnings from Outages. It covers internal vs. public postmortems, how investing in reliability can have bumps along the way, and how to make the difficult decision to try and fix something on the spot, or to do a lengthy restore. This point stood out to me:

“Move fast with autonomous teams” often builds up infrastructure debt. Reddit is a fast-moving scaleup where teams move fast, and it sounded like they had autonomy in...

Some of the Google Search rank-checking tools are so far off their scales that they look broken to me. Did Google's insane volatility break the automated Google Search volatility tracking tools?

I often post about Google ranking volatility and search ranking algorithm updates but I rarely post about them on a weekend. But I just had to this Sunday morning; the tools are literally all reporting massive and explosive volatility this weekend and the SEO chatter is also very high.

Hey there - it is me again - reporting about another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This one seemed to start yesterday, July 12th. I am seeing a lot of chatter amongst the SEO community and the automated Google tracking tools are showing heated volatility as well.

I don’t think that Threads—the new Twitter-like service from Meta—is above critique. It’s noisy, it lacks a lot of features, and there seems to be a lot of desperate land-grabbing going on by various celebrities and brands. You might even say the whole thing feels off—and there is even a fairly academic reason for that feeling. In It’s Not Cancel Culture—It’s A Platform Failure Charlie Warzel reminds us about “context collapse”:

Context collapse occurs when a surfeit of different...

Elena Verna presents a great guide to product-led sales for B2B products here here:

In a traditional top-down sales approach, the sales team is motivated to close the largest and newest deals to account for the high acquisition cost and ensure profitability.

In contrast, in a product-led sales approach, the sales team gets involved with the account much earlier in the problem lifecycle, and the initial contract value is smaller. It’s important to note that in top-down sales, the buyer...

After hearing reports that the Google News team is working on fixing an issue, Google has confirmed it last night. Many publishers were either not showing up in Google News or had limited visibility in Google News over the past few weeks. Google confirmed this is an "ongoing issue with indexing in Google News that's affecting all sites."

I think all of us could do with a bit of help increasing our intellectual humility, since “when it comes to our beliefs and opinions, most of us are much more confident than we should be”.

People who are intellectually humble know that their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints are fallible because they realize that the evidence on which their beliefs are based could be limited or flawed or that they may not have the expertise or ability to understand and evaluate the evidence. Intellectual...

Matt Rickard reminds us that it’s worth considering the long-term effects that putting public APIs behind paywalls might have on search engines:

Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’s automatic scraping of the data for Search (and...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, posted that Google's core advice around how to rank well in Google Search has not changed in two decades. Google showed a screenshot of its advice from 2002 where it wrote, "Make pages for users, not for search engines."