Industry News

Since early this year, Google began showing really long form answers, or as Google calls them, "Quick Answers...

Hugh Howey is the author of WOOL, one of my favorite sci fi series. His essay Your Fear is My Opportunity is a rant on Amazon and self-publishing, and I really appreciate his perspective as someone who has gone through the hard process of self-publishing:

The things I advocate for: Reasonably priced e-books, for publishers to take risks and do exciting things, for us to embrace the future of storytelling and allow it to coexist with the past, to release all editions of a work at once, to...

It has been exactly 297 days since the last official Penguin update, Penguin 2.1, which was on October 4th. That means it has almost been 10 months since the last update.
10 months of waiting for those hit hard by the Penguin algorithm. 10 months of having a fraction of their normal traffic and hoping Google...

On Friday we reported on the largest local search algorithm update we've seen from Google in ages. It seems from our early review of the reaction of the SEO/webmaster community that this update was indeed very large...

When Google crawls the Web to collect information about objects or entities, it also collects facts about those entities. These facts are separated into different categories or attributes associated with those entities. For example, a book may have...

A couple of articles about work and technology caught my eye this week. First, Claire Cain Miller describes how Technology, Aided by Recession, Is Polarizing the Work World:

[A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research], which analyzed data from the Current Population Survey from 1976 to 2012, illustrates that the recession had a disproportionately large effect on routine jobs, and greatly sped up their loss. That is probably because even if a new technology is...

Trevor Connolly breaks down the myth that the Post-PSD Era means that graphic designers will soon be out of a job if they don’t learn to code. From The Post PSD Era doesn’t want to kill designers:

Designers are more important in today’s digital world than ever. You are still responsible for creating flexible design systems and finding the styles that will connect with the user. Now you just have to do it faster. By ditching the PSD and streamlining the design process, you aren’t just...

Clive Thompson’s “I can’t even” is easily my favorite essay of the week. Clive goes back 100 years and finds an author that excelled at… well, I’ll let him tell you:

It must be said: Lovecraft is not a great literary stylist. His prose is good, but not great.

The one exception? This linguistic subgenre—the craft of finding new ways to say that he can’t say something. When Lovecraft does describe a monster straightforwardly, he often stumbles, defaulting to pretty journeyman...

Gideon Lewis-Kraus discusses The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect. Turns out there’s more to it than meets the eye:

A handful of factors are taken into account to weight the variables: keyboard proximity, phonetic similarity, linguistic context. But it’s essentially a big popularity contest. A Microsoft engineer showed me a slide where somebody was trying to search for the long-named Austrian action star who became governor of California. Schwarzenegger, he...

Last night, Google pushed out a new and major local search ranking algorithm change. Where Google provided details for me on this update. This is not really a spam change but more of a fundamental change to the local search ranking algorithm.