Industry News

This bit from Raluca Budiu and Page Laubheimer’s user study of digital assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri echoes my thoughts exactly on why I don’t like interacting with them:

Many participants started speaking before formulating the query completely (as you would normally do with a human), and occasionally paused searching for the best word. Such pauses are natural in conversation, but assistants did not interpret them correctly and often rushed to respond. Of course,...

Eugene Wei’s Invisible asymptotes is a long, excellent article about the importance of not just thinking about product-market fit, but also product-market unfit:

For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and I suspect the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have...

In Filter Failures Ethan Chiel asks if platforms are sucking the joy out of the internet, and he makes a pretty compelling argument:

The internet as we use it now is, for the most part, what the large platforms want it to be: an engine for serving us what their various systems think we want, or what we wanted before, or what our demographics want en masse.

Here’s the problem:

What’s lost in the process is whatever you might have found that neither you nor an algorithm...

A month ago, Google told us they are rebranding AdWords to Google Ads after 17+ years of using the brand name AdWords for their search ad product. That has happened...

Starting maybe late Friday and into Saturday there were signals of a possible Google search algorithm update. The chatter is a bit limited, more than the normal chatter, but the tracking tools mostly saw signs of an update...

You cannot be a president in the Google era without getting multiple Googlebombs throughout your service. This time, it is Trump who got Googlebombed again, for the search term [idiot] in Google Image search...

Google is updating the referrer URL from Google Image search in the upcoming months. This is super important news for anyone who has any web site that uses any form of analytics to track their incoming traffic. Those who use Google Analytics and nothing else...

My last Post was Five Years of Google Ranking Signals, and I start that post by saying that there are other posts about ranking signals that have some issues. But, I don’t want to turn people away from looking at one recent post that did contain...