Industry News

I don’t want Yelp; I want to know where to eat. I don’t care about Google Calendar; I care about not missing appointments. I don’t buy iPhones; I buy best-in-class pictures of my kids. I’m loyal only to results, and I suspect you are, too.

— From John Pavlus’s Apple and Google Race to See Who Can Kill the App First, a good reminder that users care about outcomes, not features

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....

Bing announced yesterday that this summer Bing will begin defaulting all search over HTTPS/TLS, which means they will be stripping out the keyword referrer data to web sites.

Bing is doing this to secure their search results and protect their searchers...

Looking for the latest results from Google for the 2016 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament? On Android, you’ll get a special section at the top of the search page. But on iOS and desktop, Google has no such special feature. That’s in contrast to how things worked for the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup.

On Friday, we reported how Google was inconsistently showing match results. Some searching for “world cup” would get them; others wouldn’t. Now the mystery is solved. Google said it only shows...

Search engines often provide extra links to display in search results for a site that are known as Sitelinks. Google’s help page about site links tells us that their purpose is to: … help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link...

Last week, we reported how Google Capital backed Thumbtack received a Google penalty for unnatural links. In short, they told their businesses to link to them with keyword rich anchor text in exchange for progress points to a completed profile. The penalty was reversed less than a week later.

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...