Industry News

In November, Google published an international patent that describes providing natural language type answers to queries.

Those answers focus less upon finding pages on the Web about those queries, and more on Natural Language results for the...

The Yahoo Directory, the core part of how Yahoo itself began in 1994, officially closed today, five days ahead of when Yahoo had said the end would come.

If you try to reach the Yahoo Directory at its long-standing address of http://dir.yahoo.com. you’ll now be redirected to a new location of https://business.yahoo.com/ with a home page carrying a “Yahoo Small Business” logo:



The new page still has the general look and feel of the old Yahoo Directory, listing categories that are not...

Google's John Mueller said in a Google+ hangout the other day that Google is working on some "fun stuff" around the search query reporting tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

John said this at 25 minutes and 55 seconds into the video...

It’s Christmas Eve — and that means millions of girls and boys are wondering how long until Santa Claus arrives at their homes. So where’s Santa right now? There are two major services to help: NORAD Tracks Santa and Google Santa Tracker. Below, our annual review to help you get the most out of either or both of these services, from the web to your smartphone to even an old fashioned voice-only phone. Who Tracks Santa & How They Got Started

Once again, here are the two major Santa trackers...

In the days leading up to Christmas, Barbara Starr sent me a link to a patent with a note that it would make a tremendous Christmas blog post. I absolutely agreed, and am writing and sharing that post with you now. This animation of my Great Nephew...

Google revamped their local search algorithm, we named Google Pigeon, in July of this year. It was a significant change to how Google ranked and ordered the local search results both for local queries in Google search, and within Google Maps...

Remember, a couple months ago, Microsoft dropped Duane Forrester as part of their mass layoffs? He was let go from the Bing team and the search community erupted...

I wrote a story about jazz, coffee, and liner notes, and hopefully managed to turn it into something with a logical conclusion. But feel free to judge for yourself by reading Taking back the music:

We like things fast and disposable — I get that. I mean, no one even knew what the word “ephemeral” meant until Snapchat came along. But moving quickly from one thing to the next will just never be as satisfying as really spending time with something or someone, with no escape from the person...

Bill Selman wrote a great post on the importance of research triangulation. If you have trouble making the case for qualitative research in a company smitten with “big data”, show them Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research? (emphasis mine):

There is no one research method that satisfies answering all of our questions. If the questions we are asking about user behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are based solely on assumptions formed in our homophilic bubble, we will not generate...