Industry News

Chris Palmieri’s A Practice of Ethics gets a bit rambly at times, but I really like the questions he wants designers to ask themselves. This bit on friction is particularly good:

Some friction is borne of our simple incompetence. This friction leads to the potholes of user experience — hidden data entry requirements, inscrutable error messages, long page loading times. Some friction is borne of greed, such as the tedious impedance of user abandonment. “Are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure....

I really enjoyed Craig Mod’s How to survive air travel and Cennydd Bowles’s Advice for people who aren’t exactly afraid of flying but aren’t exactly unafraid of flying either. That said, I don’t agree with all their points, so I thought I’d keep this thing going by writing about my own self-imposed list of travel rules. If you learn one thing from all these lists, let it be this: people who spend time on airplanes think about being on airplanes a lot.

In my opinion the main ingredient to...

It’s pretty expected at this point. If there’s a major sporting event, you can search for it by name on Google and get a special box with scores at the top of the search results. That’s what happened for the FIFA Men’s World Cup in 2014. But for the FIFA Women’s World Cup happening now, Google been poor in providing parity.

In 2014, a search for “world cup” when the men’s tournament happened generated special result boxes like this:



But for the women’s tournament happening now, no...

While most attention has been on the European Union wanting to impose its censorship demands on Google globally, the same thing has been happening in Canada. This week, Google lost an appeal and may have to censor content on sites outside Google Canada.

Here’s the backstory. A Canadian company named Equustek Solutions won a trademark infringement case against another company called Datalink Technologies Gateways. Equustek then wanted Google to remove links to Datalink. Google did so, but...

A couple of interesting patent applications surfaced at Google recently, involving the use of photography in Local Search, to identify whether or not businesses actually exist, or might be closed, or might be Web Spam. The first of these looks at...

The folks at WebmasterWorld have started to spike in their chatter around a possible Google update starting this morning or yesterday.

Most of those noticing the changes are based in Germany...

This weekend, Google issued a manual action on Thumbtack, a Google Capital backed company, for unnatural links pointing to their web site.

I received confirmation of the penalty earlier this week from their co-founder, Jonathan Swanson...

How tall is that tower in front of you? What’s the name of a river you’re near? What time does a store you’re looking at close? Google’s new “location-aware” search can answer questions like these, even if you yourself don’t know the exact name of something you’re near.

Google demonstrated the feature at our SMX Paris search marketing event yesterday. It’s relatively new, having been released several weeks ago both for Android and for those using the Google Search App on iOS. But Google...

Last week we reported Gary Illyes from Google was on a mission to tell you what Google calls their updates and features internally - their real names.

Yesterday, Gary Illyes called out three internal names Google uses on Twitter, they include Featured Snippets...