Industry News

There’s an old saying that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But in search, that saying is often turning into something different.

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.

Acquisition search engine optimization is happening more often as companies acquire or merge, effectively taking over shelf space on search results. Why settle for having the top result on an important term when I can have the first and second result?



Should this trend continue you could find search results where only a...

I’ve seen Anshu Sharma’s Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy come up in my feeds a bunch of times over the last couple of days. I personally found the writing quite confusing, and had to read it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. I even drew a picture to help me.

If I understand the argument correctly, Anshu is saying that wherever your core business is in the technology stack, it’s easier to expand your market by going down the stack than up. Like so:...

Gary Illyes from Google did it again, he said on Twitter that he thinks the Penguin update that was expected in 2015, that was then delayed due to the holidays and now was expected this month should launch within weeks...

Most businesses don’t admit how costly things like company wide announcements, project management, interviewing, internal politics, and large scale collaboration are on productivity. They all work against flow, and should be considered a handicap on product teams. Small teams substitute process with trust, eliminating overhead.

— Kyle Neath, Million Dollar Products

Princess Ojiaku summarizes some recent research on Why sad songs can be feel-good and noise music can be nice:

Sad music might make people feel vicarious unpleasant emotions, found a study published last year in Frontiers in Psychology. But this experience can ultimately be pleasurable because it allows a negative emotion to exist indirectly, and at a safe distance. Instead of feeling the depths of despair, people can feel nostalgia for a time when they were in a similar emotional...

I’ve long held Jakob Nielsen’s Useful = usability + utility formula in high regard. The Introduction to Usability article it comes from is still one of the best intros to user experience I’ve seen. That said, I’ve recently started to wonder about the ideal ratios on the right side of the equation. What combination of usability and utility results in the most useful product? Is it a 50/50 split? 70% usability, 30% utility? It’s a purely academic exercise because there’s not way to prove any...

I hate to cover these things over the weekend but just like the massive fluctuations we saw last weekend, which turned into a core ranking update as confirmed by Google...

I recently had to help make a case for adopting a Content Out approach on a web site redesign. This is how I aimed to do that. I tried to stay away from UX jargon and overly technical arguments. And as much as I know there is so much more to say about Content Strategy, I wanted to keep the argument succinct and avoid too much detail. This is what I came up with. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are there better ways to convince organizations of the importance of content? Introduction...

Nick Bilton quit his Nest Thermostat because a software malfunction left him unable to heat his house for a while. In Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold he extrapolates to concerns about what happens when connected devices stop working as they should:

We’ve seen this before, with wireless fobs for keyless cars. They are supposed to make life easier by letting us do away with car keys, but they also make it easier for thieves to break in (by using a simple radio...

Sarah Kessler sets out to treat an unproved disorder with an unproven form of therapy, and lived to tell the tale. From What I Learned In 12 Weeks Of Therapy For Social Media Addiction, about using online chat therapy provider Talkspace:

Though everyone says they’re addicted, [Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace] says, they aren’t necessarily motivated to solve the problem. She compares it to cigarettes. “In the early years, people were smoking like crazy,” she says, “and at some...