Industry News

The past few months have been bad for Google’s search reputation. Long considered the “gold standard” in search, Google has seen its search results questioned as never before. It’s a body blow to a core service that should be safe as Google tries to grow in new directions.

Recovering from that blow isn’t easy. What’s happened to Google search is on par with the Apple Maps fiasco or Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note7 phones.

To this day, people still joke about Apple Maps being bad, even...

When I reported on the Fred update that hit on March 8th and came up with my analysis, I said several times - there were sites that 100% saw a dive in their Google...

Late last week, most of the automated tracking tools that monitor the Google search results fluctuation reported huge spikes and changes in the Google rankings. Often that would symbolize that there was an algorithm update at Google but this time, I don't think so...

Paul Haahr, a lead search ranking engineer at Google, said on Twitter that there haven't been many changes to Google's algorithms around duplicate detection and clustering in the search results. He said "we make improvements to our code over time...

Imagine that some sites might be ranked by Google based upon how their databases might answer queries. A patent from Google refers to this approach as one that looks at database service requirements to rank large sites such as sites that cover...

Kate Wagner explores How speakers went from statement furniture to unseen tech:

In today’s wireless age, most want their sound system to be out of sight and out of mind. “If interior designers had their way,” says Scott Orth, director of electroacoustics at Sound United, “there would be no speakers at all.” Orth adds that “the trend among average consumers has been to go smaller for the last thirty years.”

But there was a time when speakers were as essential a piece of...

Jia Tolentino’s takedown of the gig economy for The New Yorker is so good. From The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death:

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing...

As you know, we finally received real confirmation this past Friday on the March 7th/8th update named the Google Fred update, which I believed targeted low value content sites...

I’ve been knee deep in hard sci-fi stories like Red Mars and Babylon’s Ashes over the past few months, so I have a special affinity for stories about space colonization at the moment. David H. Grinspoon’s The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet is a really interesting take on the ethics of colonizing a new planet:

Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot “conquer” a planet, even if — especially if — it is your home and your life support system. If we...