Industry News

It’s Christmas Eve — and that means millions of girls and boys are wondering how long until Santa Claus arrives at their homes. So where’s Santa right now? There are two major services to help: NORAD Tracks Santa and Google Santa Tracker. Below, our annual review to help you get the most out of either or both of these services, from the web to your smartphone to even an old fashioned voice-only phone. Who Tracks Santa & How They Got Started

Once again, here are the two major Santa trackers...

In the days leading up to Christmas, Barbara Starr sent me a link to a patent with a note that it would make a tremendous Christmas blog post. I absolutely agreed, and am writing and sharing that post with you now. This animation of my Great Nephew...

Google revamped their local search algorithm, we named Google Pigeon, in July of this year. It was a significant change to how Google ranked and ordered the local search results both for local queries in Google search, and within Google Maps...

Remember, a couple months ago, Microsoft dropped Duane Forrester as part of their mass layoffs? He was let go from the Bing team and the search community erupted...

I wrote a story about jazz, coffee, and liner notes, and hopefully managed to turn it into something with a logical conclusion. But feel free to judge for yourself by reading Taking back the music:

We like things fast and disposable — I get that. I mean, no one even knew what the word “ephemeral” meant until Snapchat came along. But moving quickly from one thing to the next will just never be as satisfying as really spending time with something or someone, with no escape from the person...

Bill Selman wrote a great post on the importance of research triangulation. If you have trouble making the case for qualitative research in a company smitten with “big data”, show them Why Do We Conduct Qualitative User Research? (emphasis mine):

There is no one research method that satisfies answering all of our questions. If the questions we are asking about user behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are based solely on assumptions formed in our homophilic bubble, we will not generate...

Google announced something really big, which I am surprised the search marketing community isn't talking about more. They launched "Store Visits," a new estimate added to your estimated total conversions within your AdWords campaign that aims on bridging your online ads to physical in-store conversion sales.

Google Image search back inJanuary 2013, changed their design to show a preview of the image, directly in the Google Image search results, behind a black bar.

Google Germany seems to have dropped that feature. Via Martin Ice Web in the WebmasterWorld forums...

Paul Ford knocks it out of the park again in What I learned about hatred from my tiny daughter, an essay about collective anger on the internet:

When you aggregate enough people and get them to talk about design they become, basically, a single giant toddler.