Industry News

I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My...

Google has slapped two more link networks in Poland late last night.

Google posted details about how reconsideration requests work on the Google Poland blog. And Google's Karolina Kruszynska confirmed with me this morning that Google went after two different Polish link networks...

I have no idea if anyone else will find this helpful, but I’m so excited about it that I have to share it1. One of the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks in blogging is uploading images to my Amazon S3 account, generating the CDN link, and inserting it into the post. But I’ve now cobbled together a recipe that makes this really easy, and I’d like to tell you about it. First, here are the ingredients you’ll need: An Amazon S3 account for image storage (optional: Cloudfront CDN)...

Years ago, I started referring to search results as recommendations, seeing how they’ve been starting to look more and more like that part of a page at Amazon that says “people who viewed this book also looked at these books.” When someone searches...

Pedro Dias, a former Google employee who worked on the Search Quality and Webspam team for years, said on Twitter that Google is less likely to trust a link after it is modified...

Google Webmaster Tools began sending out notices to webmasters who had their content removed from the European versions of Google over the Right To Be Forgotten law in the European Union...

Working with people can be hard. Designing with people can be even harder. Designing with people who are not in the same location can be almost impossible. There’s no perfect solution for working in distributed teams, but if there’s one tool that seems to get our community further than most, it’s Trello. I’ve seen some really great Trello workflow posts over the past few months: How we use Trello & Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day Coordinating with Cards (Kickstarter) How We Make...

In A Corrected History of the Typo Adrienne LaFrance argues that maybe print errors aren’t such a bad thing:

What we’ve lost, in many cases, online, isn’t the integrity of print, but the traceability of its weaknesses. Centuries ago, “errata lists became, paradoxically, markers of well-made books.” The made in “well-made” is a key word here. Mistakes can serve as reminders that books are made at all—the physicality of the process, the “connection between the book going wrong, momentarily,...

David Carr in For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated:

Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march. [...]

And:

Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons — it’s the cockroach of the Internet.

Well, I confess that I have also succumbed to the lure of this particular cockroach, and have been experimenting with a...

I don’t quite get the style of John Herrman’s Internet, Why So Blue?1, but this bit about why hyperlinks started out blue is quite interesting:

The man who invented links2 was writing them to a grayscale screen. The first popular browser, Mosaic, later turned links blue because it was the darkest color available at the time that wasn’t black; they needed to stand out, but only just. Blue was the best alternative. Blue always survives the focus group. Blue wins the a/b test. Which is...