Industry News

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has purchased Topsy, one of the leading Twitter search and analytics companies, for more than $200 million.

The WSJ report says that Apple has confirmed the deal but wouldn’t comment more beyond this statement: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.

Topsy is about the only decent third-party Twitter search service to have survived, in recent years.

Google had a...

I’m a little hesitant to believe these kinds of stats without seeing the actual research (and you have to pay for this report, which makes it even harder to verify), but Voxburner claims that 62% of 16-24s prefer books as physical products. That’s interesting in itself, but even more interesting is the reasons they cite:

There is less affection towards electronic versions of books. Whereas age is shown in the spine of each book — and commitment by the size of one’s bookshelf — digital...

Ten years ago today was my first post on the Search Engine Roundtable and I have not stopped since. I've been writing about search, SEO, Google, Bing, Yahoo and search engines that have come and gone for ten straight years. On average, I push out five articles a day on this site - it still amazes me to this day that there are five new things I can talk about within the search niche daily.
I've spent 30% of my life writing about search engines...

Adam Corner provides a very interesting perspective on modern advertising in Ad nauseam — Advertising turned anti-consumerism into a weapon. He starts off by discussing a new brand of ad that wants to join us in our distaste for, well, advertising:

These ads want to be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials,...

Tim Caynes’ on exposure is an honest and accurate depiction of what it’s like to work at a design agency:

if there’s one thing that really hits home in your first 3 months of transition, it’s the change in pace. and it’s not that the change in pace is a bad thing. it’s just that it feels like you don’t have enough time to think. which means you don’t have enough time to design. which is stressful and surprising and difficult and awkward. because you might not actually be able to do it....

A WebmasterWorld thread plus dozens of threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums have webmasters complaining about both ranking changes and traffic drops from Google's search engine.

The traffic drop would make sense being that it is a holiday and on US holidays traffic normally drops...

In The Disconnectionists Nathan Jurgenson takes to task those who speak about digital detoxes and the negative social effects of being online:

Op-eds, magazine articles, news programs, and everyday discussion frames logging off as reclaiming real social interaction with your real self and other real people. The R in IRL. When the digital is misunderstood as exclusively “virtual,” then pushing back against the ubiquity of connection feels like a courageous re-embarking into the wilderness...

It’s official. NORAD Tracks Santa, the annual Santa tracking effort run by the joint US-Canadian air defense organization, will be using Microsoft’s Bing for the second year to map Santa’s route. But will Google be mapping Santa on a different route, as happened when it ran its own breakaway tracking service last year? There’s hope of perhaps a “Miracle On 34th Street” moment that may prevent this. No One Tells Santa Where To Fly

Let’s be clear about one thing. Santa Claus flies wherever...

Happy Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah - rare overlap) to all our readers. Today I wanted to share with you the logos, doodles, themes, designs and animations from the search industry...