Industry News

On Friday morning we were the first to report widespread panic around Google AdWords quality score drops. It turned out, as expected...

Tim Harford has an excellent critique of the statistical issues with the “big data” trend in Big data: are we making a big mistake? First, there’s this:

But the “big data” that interests many companies is what we might call “found data”, the digital exhaust of web searches, credit card payments and mobiles pinging the nearest phone mast.

I still love the term “digital exhaust”. I first saw Frank Chimero use it in the context of social media when he said (in a post that’s now gone...

I am still seeing massive chatter around Google's search results changing both in terms of Webmaster Tools showing changes in rankings...

Charles Fishman’s They Write the Right Stuff is an incredible profile of the engineers who write software for NASA’s space shuttle missions:

How do they write the right stuff?

The answer is, it’s the process. The group’s most important creation is not the perfect software they write — it’s the process they invented that writes the perfect software.

It’s the process that allows them to live normal lives, to set deadlines they actually meet, to stay on budget, to deliver...

A week or so ago, we asked if Google News will also be impacted by the mobile-friendly algorithm.

The answer is what I expected, that no, not yet.

Stacie Chan, who I have been pestering on this question for over a week...

Dave Pell—in the context of Facebook’s plan to host news sites’ content natively—explains what tech people are good at (and usually not good at) in Don’t Take a Flying Leap:

But building a really successful app or site does not mean you know more about education than educators. Disrupting the photo-sharing space does not qualify you to disrupt higher education. Or to understand the health system better than doctors. Or to understand the woes of urban poverty better than those who have...

When someone performs a search at one of the major search engines, the search engine focuses upon returning as quick and helpful an answer as possible. Part of that can involve looking the query up in a “trending topics” database to see if...

I know, we just covered huge chatter around a Google update last Friday but there is no doubt in my mind, Google is testing algorithms maybe around Panda or Penguin or the doorway algorithm is being released or maybe a whole new beast.
This morning the...

Douglas McGray’s How Carrots Became The New Junk Food is not about carrots. I mean it is, a little bit. But it’s mostly about product positioning and marketing.

“Everyone else pitched baby carrots as an antidote to junk food,” [Jeff] Dunn says. “Where [ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky] came out was almost the exact opposite. We want to be junk food.”

They realized that junk food is desirable. So instead of pitting carrots against that industry, they decided to play to its...