Industry News

Over the past two days it has felt like there was some sort of ranking adjustment made in the Google Search organic results. Yea, I know, organic search doesn't send clicks anymore, but they are still ranked and it seems like there was some sort of larger shuffle in those rankings.

A couple of years ago, we covered a report by the NY Times on the ongoing issues with review scams and blackmail. Well, the issue is not gone, despite Google responding to that report. From what I am told, it is still relatively common and our own Bill Hartzer was recently threatened and blackmailed with this over SMS.

Over 6 months ago, a Google search representative said we should all expect more core updates, more often. And in the past six months, we have had only one confirmed Google update, the March 2025 core update.

Google is now showing price tracking widgets at the top of the feed. We've seen products with price tracking markup notifications within the feed but these widget styles may be new.

Google posted a new document on the topic of its AdSense for Search Restricted Access Features (RAFs). Google said, "Starting on August 25, 2025, certain AdSense for Search features have limitations depending on an account's status within the Search Partner Network."

Microsoft is testing italicizing the URLs in the Bing Search results. It is a bit weird to look at and I am not sure why Bing is testing this but they are.

I know we’re drowning in vibe coding stuff right now, but this extensive post about shipping code with Claude is a fantastic resource. Great prompt rules and tips, and also solid advice for what the humans are for…

Your role as a senior engineer has fundamentally shifted. You’re no longer just writing code—you’re curating knowledge, setting boundaries, and teaching both humans and AI systems how to work effectively.

Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve...

This is great advice on providing feedback on docs. This especially resonated:

Before starting, remember that the goal of providing feedback on a document is to help the author. Optimizing for anything else, even if it’s a worthy cause, discourages authors from sharing their future writing. If you prioritize something other than helping the author, you are discouraging them from sharing future work.

→ How to provide feedback on documents.

I love this take on the “10x engineer” phenomenon. Ubuntu (the African concept, not the operating system…) strikes again. “I am because you are.”

Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software. What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own.

→ In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

Robin Sloan discusses Substack, and platforms in general, in another excellent post:

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago.

→ Platform reality