Industry News

Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.

What’s a “search algorithm?”

That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.

What’s “Hummingbird?”

It’s the name of...

At a special event in the garage where Google was born, the company announced a new “Hummingbird” search algorithm is live and especially designed to handle complex queries. Google also announced a new design for tablets and phones, richer direct answers with comparison, a new song exploration feature and notifications of Google Now information for iOS 7.

Below is our live blog with the news. Google’s also posted more information here. We’ll also have more breakout stories to come, so check...

Google quietly announced on Google+ via Zaheed Sabur, a software engineer at the company, that you can now search for hashtags on Google.com and see results from Google+.

Google turns 15 this week — celebrating its official birthday on Friday. But it already is gearing up for the celebrations with a special easter egg. Search for “google in 1998,” and you’ll see how Google used to look back then, in the year of its birth.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, shared the news on Twitter. Here’s how it looks: Kind of nostalgic seeing the old look — and some of the names of other search engines of the period, which Google used to link to at the bottom...

While it's easy to say what SEO isn't, it's a lot harder to pin down exactly what SEO is these days. On the other hand, SEO is still the same thing I said it was when I first started writing about it over a decade ago -- that is, making your website the best it can be both for people and search engines.

I really enjoyed this interview with Flipboard’s Marcos Weskamp about the ephemeral nature of digital design. From David Zax’s write-up, How Flipboard’s Head Designer Grapples With The Web’s Manic Pace Of Change:

Graphic design today, says Weskamp, is something like making mandalas, the ritual symbols sometimes designed by monks. Mandalas are occasionally made of soaps, sands, or powders, rendering them inherently ephemeral. Many artists do their work in the hopes of creating something...

Ian McAllister states a common rallying cry of the Lean movement in his answer to the Quora question What should a lean startup functional spec / product requirements doc look like?:

Functional specs or product requirements documents invite scope creep and are walking dead documents.

I’d like to start my rebuttal with something Joel Spolsky wrote in Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1, back in 2000:

Failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take...

Ghost Rank 2.0 was hit hard by Google. It seems that at least one of the underground and under the radar networks was severely hurt by Google and many of the sites using them to rank well in Google are now penalized. Google's Matt Cutts did issue a warning on Twitter a few weeks ago...

I assume by now, you've all seen the news that Google has secured ALL searches leading to all their organic search query referrer data to go completely 100% not provided.
In fact, I checked this morning, and this site shows 93.4% of all Google organic search queries as being not provided. What about the other 6.6%? Maybe the SSL migration of Google is not 100% complete yet?