Industry News

Matt Cutts talks about the early days at Google, how he got to work on search quality and even shares a slide on his relationship with the SEO/webmaster community. I believe Greg Boser got a call out. :)

Sigh… Every few years, there’s a renewed effort in the worlds of shoddy journalism, clickbait, and cheap pageviews to claim the death of SEO. Recently, a few articles, a handful of folks on Twitter, and some presentations I’ve come across have been using this chart to PROVE that this time, SEO really is dying: Google Trends Search for “SEO”

See how there’s a slight downward trend from the middle of 2012 to today? Our doom must be at hand!

Those of us in the search world know that...

Earlier this month I did a talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about lessons learned from the early days of Google. The video is now online and watchable, or you can watch it on YouTube:



We did the talk in a pretty large room, and the camera at the back of the room couldn’t easily record me and the slides at the same time. So here are the slides to go along with the talk:



Or you can view the slides at this link.

I believe all the pictures should be...

Richard Seroter’s 10 Architecture Tips From “The Timeless Way of Building” is highly relevant to software development as well:

“Each building when it is first built, is an attempt to make a self-maintaining whole configuration … But our predictions are invariably wrong … It is therefore necessary to keep changing the buildings, according to the real events which actually happen there.” (p. 479-480) The last portion of the book drives home that fact that no building  (software...

This is pretty fantastic. The new Sonos logo pulses like sound waves when you scroll up and down. Brand New comments:

There is no doubt this is a party.

Indeed.

Designed by Bruce Mau Design.

This may be a bit premature but I am seeing very early signs of a possible Google search algorithm update touching down. A WebmasterWorld has some European webmasters noticing some shifts and changes in the Google search results...

Melissa Dahl talked to some people to find out Why You Keep Mishearing That Taylor Swift Lyric:

“There’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,” but another piece of our understanding comes from our minds — from our expectations, in other words. It’s easy to see how this explanation applies to many misheard lyrics, specifically the most-often cited one from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” which contains the lyrics “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”;...

I recently realized that the web services I love and use the most are all run by indie developers or small companies. While I ponder what that means, I thought I’d do my little part to tell you about them in case you’re in the market for one of these things.

These are all services I’ve used for a while and have no intention of leaving. Unless they shut down. PLEASE SUPPORT THEM SO THEY DON’T SHUT DOWN. I use Feedbin as my back-end for RSS reading. It’s solid. It always updates fast, it...

In November we reported that Firefox made a deal with Yahoo to become the default search provider, ultimately dropping Google. The search share numbers came out this week and Google, showing Google lost almost 2 percentage points of market share to Yahoo...

Now that Yahoo has gained search share from Google thanks to its Firefox deal, the search giant seems to be finally hitting back with moves to get users to switch to Google.

I’ve been checking each week since the deal was announced in November to see if Google would finally do as I expected, try to prompt those using Firefox to change back from Yahoo to Google. Yesterday evening, it finally happened.

When I used Firefox on a Windows 10 Lenovo laptop, I got this message:



You can...