Industry News

From Will Oremus’s insightful story How Facebook’s news feed algorithm works:

Facebook’s data scientists were aware that a small proportion of users—5 percent—were doing 85 percent of the hiding. When Facebook dug deeper, it found that a small subset of those 5 percent were hiding almost every story they saw—even ones they had liked and commented on. For these “superhiders,” it turned out, hiding a story didn’t mean they disliked it; it was simply their way of marking the post “read,”...

Historical recording Aboriginal Corroboree, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Some rights reserved

Advertising on the Web is going through some changes because of how smart phones and tablets track visitors on a site, and how...

It’s interesting to see the web vs apps pendulum swing back to the web in recent months. From Larry Seltzer’s Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete?:

What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There’s no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying...

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.

― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

The Mechanical wasn’t on my radar until a friend recommended it, but it jumped to the top of my reading queue as soon as I read the blurb. I’m not usually a fan of alternate...

I highly doubt Google did any quality update yesterday, as they said updates like Penguin aren't happening until next year but with core search algorithms...

John Mueller, Google's webmaster trends analysts, has a tradition every year - to spend some time in the help forums during Christmas eve and day helping webmasters who ...

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate today. There is literally no SEO news today, at least none I can find worth posting today. So I figured I would share the different logos, themes and designs the search industry has come up for Christmas...

Where’s Santa Claus? When will he arrive? Those are questions millions of children around the world are wondering this Christmas Eve. To help, two wonderful services stand ready as usual: NORAD Tracks Santa and Google Santa Tracker.

We here at Search Engine Land also stand ready, as usual, with our own tradition: the annual review of both services and how to get the most out of them, whether you’re accessing them from the web or a smartphone, or even by making an old-fashioned voice phone...

Today is Festivus, when you should be airing your grievances and putting up the Festivus pole — assuming you celebrate the entirely fictional holiday invented by the Seinfeld television series in 1997. Google’s again in the spirit providing everyone with their own Festivus pole.

Just search for “festivus” on Google, and you’ll see the pole to the left of Google’s search results:



The pole even has a little stand way down at the bottom of the page. At the top, the page reminds you...