Industry News

A pantent granted to Google this past fall explores how the search engine looks for patterns on Web pages to use to find facts on the Web to fill up Google’s data repository (Knowledge Base). I recently wrote a series of posts about Google...

In my latest column for A List Apart I discuss our obsession with “managerial tracks” in career development, and propose something different. From Managing and Making: It Doesn’t Have to Be One or the Other:

I think we need a career system that encourages people to oscillate between individual contributor roles and manager roles. Maybe we provide “manager sabbaticals” where a manager becomes an individual contributor on a team for six to nine months. Maybe when a manager goes on...

Google published a foreign patent at WIPO today that has an interesting perspective to it. When someone performs a search that involves a specific entity, their search may be influenced by the search engine’s knowledge of their past interactions...

It seems Google may have tested a search algorithm update yesterday late morning and then may have pulled it back.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has chatter from the SEO community around the update but the chatter soon died down after things settled back...

Kashmir Hill asks an interesting question: Who do we blame when a robot threatens to kill people?

Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot’s control had tweeted, according to the Guardian, “I seriously want to kill people.” But the menacing tweet wasn’t written by van der Goot; it was written by a robot.

He goes on:

Bots will be bots. They won’t know if they’re doing something wrong...

It seems like Webmasters and SEOs are getting restless again, this time with the Panda update or lack there of.

The last time webmasters had an official Google Panda update was on September 25, 2014, Google Panda 4.1...

Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings.

— Eating your own dog food on Wikipedia

In software circles dogfooding is usually encouraged — and for good reason. When companies force themselves to use their own products extensively it can have some great benefits. Since internal users visit even the darkest, most neglected corners of a product, bugs tend to be found and fixed much faster than...

Jon Ronson looks into online shaming (and the lives it destroys) in a brilliant piece of journalism called How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life:

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever...

In a Google+ live hangout with Google's John Mueller on last Friday morning, John answered the question, "is link building in anyway way good...