Industry News

Recently I’ve seen several interesting conversations about ad blocking, and I wanted to remind people about a great offering called Google Contributor. With Google Contributor, you contribute a certain amount of money each month. That subscription means that you see fewer ads on the web, and you support the sites that you visit with your money.

You get to decide how much to contribute (I do $10/month, but for example you can do $2/month if you prefer). The more you contribute, the fewer...

Google announced a ton of reminders around their handling of hacked sites within the Google Search Console...

Many in China will be using Baidu rather than Microsoft’s Bing search engine within Windows 10, thanks to a new distribution deal that Microsoft has announced.

“Baidu Windows 10 Express” is a new way to get Windows, through a deal signed between Microsoft and Baidu, China’s dominant and homegrown search engine.

As part of the deal, the default search engine will be Baidu rather than Microsoft’s own Bing search engine. Usually, Bing is the default search engine in Windows 10, unless...

Back in 2009, Matt Cutts from Google wrote on PageRank sculpting saying:

So what happens when you have a page with âten PageRank pointsâ and ten outgoing links...

I’ve been doing some work on threaded discussions and comment threads in our web and mobile apps, and I thought it might be useful to summarize some of my findings here. The particular issue we’re trying to address is how to deal with infinitely threaded discussions, like the kind you find on Hacker News and Reddit1:



The first thing I did was some research on the different approaches currently used on the web and mobile for discussions and comments. There are some weird outliers,...

Here’s some solid pragmatism from James Archer in Why is it so Easy to Get “Mobile First” Wrong?:

Mobile-first design isn’t, in itself, the right answer. It’s just an efficient answer. If you can design for one device and then tweak it to more or less function on other devices, you shave a lot of time off the design process. With the cornucopia of possible devices you’d otherwise have to design for, that’s definitely a good thing.

I find the common meme of “Oh, that’s ugly—a developer must have designed that” pretty misguided (and I’m not even a developer). The reason is that most developers I know have exceptional ideas (and taste). So these words from Marty Cagan really resonated with me:

I consider this mindset of the product owner (or more generally, the CEO or stakeholders) as the only one that can determine what to build, as toxic to teams, and a major reason for the lack of innovation. I’ve tried to...

Last Friday, Google posted a warning to repeated violators of the Google Webmaster Guidelines that Google may take "further action" and/or it may be "more difficult" to be successful in reversing the penalty. Again, this was aimed at manual actions only...

Photo from Rugby World Cup site.

Looking to get the latest information on the 2015 Rugby World Cup, which began today and runs through October? Don’t google it. Bing it — because Bing’s got scores, line-ups and information while Google has nothing.

Search for “rugby world cup” on Bing, and you get the latest scores of any matches:



That includes a link to the current standings. You can also click from the box to various days to see upcoming matches, along with Bing’s prediction...

Google, Apple and Microsoft all have agents that want to be your personal assistant. But how well Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana can predict your needs depends on how much you want to share, how wedded to particular platforms you want to be and, in some cases, how much you actively want to help make those predictions happen. Going Under-The-Hood

Ferreting out how these agents work is a challenge. The companies all have pages that describe Google Now, Apple Siri and...