Industry News

CNN has an interesting article about placebo buttons:

In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function, confirmed a spokesperson from the city’s Department of Transportation in an email.

The article quotes Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer for the reasoning behind this:

According to Langer, placebo buttons have a net positive effect on our lives, because they give us the illusion of control — and something to do in situations where the...

I am seeing super early signs of a Google search algorithm update brewing right now. There is some early limited chatter as of early this morning in the forums and on social media. Some of the automated tracking tools also are picking up changes, while some are not. So it is super early but something might be brewing - we should know more within 24 hours or so.

As you know, Google has graduated the Google Search Console out of beta and with that, added a new live feature for the URL Inspection tool and also brought in the manual actions section into the tool. Google also cleaned up the side bar navigation to access these features.

Mind the Product has a good write-up of C. Todd Lombardo’s talk called Roadmaps are Dead! Long Live Roadmaps! I’m also in the “prioritize themes, not features” camp:

Every theme on your roadmap should have a problem, an objective, and even some potential ideas you have to solve those problems. In practice, this changes how your roadmap looks. Rather than being a list of features, it might start from an objective of reducing support costs, and then show themes that might help reach...

Here is our monthly Google Webmaster report with the big ticket item being the Google Medic Update coverage, with some other updates this past month as well. Google launched a link report in the new Google Search Console, updated some reporting and launched some new search features.

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the source of the link alone doesn't make the link a bad link. It also depends on other factors. For example, John asked if the the destination owner placed the link on the source themselves or not.

Remember we reported that Google dropped anonymous queries from the Search Analytics and Performance reports in Google Search Console on August 19th? Well, Google is now clarifying that the data was never displayed but the queries they hide were previously used in the total sum but are now being removed from the total sum.

Nicholas Carr discusses the importance of using the right terminology when we talk about how companies use our data in his essay I am a data factory (and so are you). On the problems with the “data mining” metaphor:

Data does not lie passively within me, like a seam of ore, waiting to be extracted. Rather, I actively produce data through the actions I take over the course of a day. When I drive or walk from one place to another, I produce locational data. When I buy something, I...