Industry News

About a week ago, Google launched a feature to show no search results on the search results page, it was called zero results and only showed up for calculations, conversions and time queries...

In The Tyranny of Convenience Tim Wu argues that life has become… well, too easy:

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on...

Erica Dhawan and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic have some good suggestions in their article How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote. I found this part particularly interesting:

First, consider that there are three kinds of distance in remote collaboration: physical (place and time), operational (team size, bandwidth and skill levels) and affinity (values, trust, and interdependency). The best way for managers to drive team performance is by focusing on reducing affinity...

Google announced this morning the introduction of Shopping Actions. Google say this program "gives customers an easy way to shop your products on the Google Assistant and Search with a universal cart, whether theyâre on mobile...

Two related articles about YouTube caught my eye over the past few days. The first, Zeynep Tufekci’s YouTube, the Great Radicalizer explains how YouTube’s algorithms almost always lead people to conspiracy theory videos:

It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful...

Annalee Newitz wrote a really interesting essay on how economic anxieties are creeping into fantasy and science fiction stories. From The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction:

We’re used to science fiction providing us with commentary on technology, and vocabulary to discuss its more worrisome consequences. But underlying our fears of robots stealing our jobs or corporations turning us into consumer droids are more basic anxieties about money—and science fiction is increasingly reflecting...

As you know, Google is now sometimes showing no search results on the search results page - instead, Google is just showing answers for queries related to time, conversions and calculations...

A few months ago, I settled on a name for my new company. Since the launch two weeks ago, I’ve received the question, “why SparkToro?” a few dozen times. Unlike my prior entrepreneurial venture (in which I started with the very awkward SEOmoz.org, and later rebranded to Moz.com), I was far more thoughtful and intentional this time around. And since…

The post How to Choose a Startup Name that Reduces Marketing Friction appeared first on SparkToro.

Google is showing answers in the search results without showing any organic listings or ads or anything but the answer. Yehoshua Coren posted on Twitter a screen shot of him going to Google and Google returning the answer and a button to show search results...