Industry News

A Google patent granted this week describes how Google might try to understand Entities that appear on Web pages, and how that awareness might influence the search results that the search engine shows off in search results. An Entity is a...

Two recent articles made me think again about how weird journalism and publishing has become because of the internet and social media. In Instagram’s TMZ Jenna Wortham describes a very successful celebrity gossip “site” (what should we call these things now?) that exists primarily on Instagram:

Angie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress. When she started...

Benedict Evans wrote a characteristically brilliant analysis in What does Google need on mobile? Here’s a taste of his conclusion about Google’s challenge going forward:

The key change in all of this, I think, is that Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity—a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home—to one of perfect complexity—every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other...

After years of investigation, we finally have a formal EU antitrust complaint against Google in search. It’s narrow — all about shopping search. Here’s a look at the specific charges and what they might mean for the search engine.

The EU is issuing a “Statement Of Objections” to Google outlining its concerns, where it will back these up with what will be pages and pages of evidence. The public won’t have access to this, but there’s an excellent change it will leak. Until then, all the...

As you know, there has been a lot of contradictory statements from Google around how Penguin and Panda are run, is it real time, is it manual, how long does it take...

Marty Cagan continues his excellent product autonomy series by discussing what happens when teams get large enough to split up their code bases. In Autonomy vs. Ownership he describes his preferred way of dealing with the situation where a team needs a change in a different codebase to get one of their features implemented:

The alternative model is informally known as the “open source” model although to be clear this is not about open sourcing your code, it’s just called that because...

Does the name Bryan Seely ring a bell? He’s the guy last year who managed to create fake listings for the US Secret Service and the FBI in Google Maps that some people fell for. Seely did it to demonstrate a weakness with Google Maps, one that still exists and allowed him to recently make another fake listing — this time putting Edward Snowden in the White House.



Google Maps Shows Edward Snowden In The White House is our Marketing Land story from yesterday that explains how the...

I’m a long-time Pinboard fan, and from the moment I became a paid user I couldn’t shake the feeling that it is one of the most underrated services out there. It’s basically the center of my personal internet. I have years of articles tagged and cached, and available immediately whenever I need to remember something. For me, it represents the best of what technology has to offer as an “external brain”1.

But it’s even more powerful than that. I recently started wondering if Pinboard could...

A month ago, Google told us they would provide clarity over Panda updates since we were not sure if Google's contradictory statements around Panda running in real time versus not running since October...

Google has suggested that having to wait months between for Panda and Penguin updates would be a thing of the past, since these were supposed to be happening on an ongoing basis now. But the company flip-flopped about this last week. Both still work on a periodic basis, with months elapsing between updates. How Panda & Penguin Work

Before getting to the flip-flop, let’s do a reminder of how Panda and Penguin have traditionally worked.

Panda is a filter Google uses to identify...