Industry News

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.

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.

Google says search algorithms, spam detection...

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to AI Search and the changes that come with that, Google's core search algorithms, spam detection methods, spam policies, and other search systems do not fundamentally change.

Bing Search has rolled out what it calls multi-turn search in Bing globally. This is something we saw Microsoft Bing test back in June, when we saw a floating Copilot follow up search box at the footer of the Bing search results page show up as you scroll. It is now globally live for all to use.

OpenAI seems to be jazzing up its ChatGPT responses by showing more visual responses, like Google's knowledge panels and top stories. This goes across people, places, products, and ideas, OpenAI said.

Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling included faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters, calendar parameters and other "weird" parameters.

Google's John Mueller said he would "caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO" when it comes to reviewing bad redirects or CSP settings. Why, because bad redirects or CSP settings are often simply visible when doing normal browsing, and if you see it, then that is enough.

I keep thinking about this essay by Mike Fisher about what happens when automation makes work easier. His central argument challenges the assumption that’s baked into most AI-and-jobs discourse:

In every domain where automation becomes powerful, the pattern remains consistent. Human expertise becomes more valuable because the total volume of meaningful work increases. Early fears of automation nearly always assume a fixed amount of work being redistributed. But work is not fixed. Work...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

As you know, January was an incredibly intense month of Google Search ranking volatility. It surprised me that Google has still not confirmed that a Google search ranking update took place. Now, John Mueller of Google was asked about it and said, "Unfortunately, I don't have any insights / updates to share."