Industry News

This take on the Pocket shutdown resonates with me real hard:

“What began as a read-it-later app”, they assert, “evolved into something much bigger.” That was the whole problem: the mistake that led ultimately to this “difficult decision” by Mozilla. Pocket was a good tool. Its integration with Kobo, another excellent tool, made it that much more valuable to users like me. We didn’t need “something much bigger”. But by trying to turn Pocket into something much bigger, Mozilla actually...

Great advice here for new managers in this wild time we find ourselves in. In general:

Whereas the previous focus of managers was to rapidly hire and scale their teams, today’s focus is on expanding impact. This is because in today’s macroeconomic environment, output is key. In the eyes of a 2025 company, the more that you can do with fewer people, the better. There are very few additional people to go around, so the focus is on how you can help your team do more with less.

James...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

The other day, I complained that Google told us we'd have more core updates, more often. Well, Google also said they would support more structured data, and Google did the complete opposite of that.

Microsoft released its Microsoft Advertising trust and safety report, which revealed it removed or restricted over one billion ads. The company also suspended over 475,000 advertiser accounts over the year.

Google is testing showing the ability to search in AI Mode within the Chrome search bar on desktop and Android devices. This is obviously being tested both in the US and in India, where AI Mode is available.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been hearing buzz that some think that Google Search Console will show the "query fan-out" queries in Google Search Console. It does not, Google Search Console at best will show you the query used by the searcher, not how Google AI is expanding the query with its query fan-out technique.

Google is reportedly rolling out a new way to conduct broad match keywords experiments and A/B testing. Google wrote this "new approach is aimed at delivering faster results and reducing some of the common experimentation errors, by diverting traffic and budget within the existing campaign (instead of creating a campaign copy for the experiment treatment arm)."

I read Ethan Marcotte’s Link bug this week, which led me to Sophie Koonin’s Automated weekly links posts with raindrop.io and Eleventy , and that is such a cool idea that I had to do something similar.

Thanks to getting nerdswiped by Ethan and Sophie I now have a Cloudflare Worker that takes links that I tag with blog on Raindrop.io, and posts it (with excerpt taken from the Notes section) as a link post to this blog. You can just scroll down to see a bunch of example.

It’s not fancy...

Google Ads is experiencing some technical difficulties, although their ad status dashboard indicates that all is currently fine. The issue is somewhat significant in that even Microsoft Advertising is warning that you should manually update your Microsoft Ads account instead of using the Google Import when the Google APIs are having issues.