Industry News

For a long time, folks in the search, technology, and marketing worlds have surmised that Google is using query and clickthrough data to bias search result rankings. I recently observed several examples of this via some industry colleagues (that, unfortunately, I cannot share publicly), and thought, “what the heck, let’s give it a spin.” On April 30th, at 6:03pm Pacific, I performed the following query:

A blog post I’d published last week ranked number 7 in Google US results...

Last night, some anonymous person claiming to have worked in the Google AdSense department for "several years" posted a story named "Google AdSense Leak." In where he describes...

In What If Doctors Could Finally Prescribe Behavior Change? Sean Duffy explains why behavior change is so difficult, particularly in healthcare:

Whether it’s for weight loss, smoking cessation, diabetes, or otherwise, the best research shows that meaningful behavior change outcomes require not just guidance from a trusted health professional, but also positive social support, easy-to-digest insights about their condition, a carefully orchestrated timeline, and a process that follows...

We all know how destructive interruptions at work are, and how a constant pressure to always be online increases stress levels exponentially. The thing is, we can fix this problem. Clive Thompson asks Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? and reports on a recent study to measure the effects of changing that behavior:

[Harvard professor Leslie] Perlow suggested they carve out periods of “predictable time off”—evening and weekend periods where team members...

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why and when Google may use something other than your title tag for the search results title snippet.

Matt Cutts suggested that it is best for your to try to anticipate what the user will search for when crafting your title tags...

Carl Malamud, a well respected technologist, author, and public domain advocate posted on Twitter that Bing's spider "got a timeout" by not playing nice with the IRS database. It seems that BingBot...

Mat Honan’s Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?1 set off the latest in what has become a recurring tech theme over the past few years:

I’m perpetually distracted, staring into my hand, ignoring the people around me. Hit Refresh and get a reward, monkey. Feed the media and it will nourish you with @replies and Likes until you’re hungry and bleary and up way too late alone in bed, locked in the feedback loop. What will my daughter’s loop look like? I’m afraid to find out.

This...