Industry News

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

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering:

Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.

I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the...

This isn’t entirely surprising but it’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s worth highlighting not just how, but also where LLMs are being trained:

Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

I know it’s too dismissive to call chatbots “fancy autocomplete” like many do, but we...

There have been some people noticing that the Google Notes On Search labs experiment has an end date of May 2024 and thus they are expecting Notes on Search to be turned off by then. Just because it has that end date listed, it does not mean the labs experiment will end on that date.

Google has announced a number of new travel features with Google Maps and Travel around driving alternatives, trains and buses, travel impact mode and then some new EV driving direction features. Google says these features are to give you more "sustainable choices."

On August 31, 2021, Google notified advertisers it would drop support for expanded text ads for responsive search ads. Google is now reminding advertisers that Ad customizers for text ads, expanded text ads and Dynamic Search Ads will stop serving after May 31, 2024.

Google has discontinued its support for video carousel markup and has thus removed it from its video structured data help documentation. Initially, Google tested video carousel on a limited number of sites and is now saying that it "ultimately found that it wasn't useful for the ecosystem at scale."

Google sent out emails a couple of days ago to businesses asking them to register their Automated External Defibrillator (AED) with Google Business Profiles. Google said, "you could save lives" if you do it.

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

I know we just reported on more volatility this Monday, possibly related to the Google March 2024 core update, but we are seeing even more volatility over the past 24 hours related to this update. This volatility shows deepening movement for those who were hit, which is incredibly sad in many cases.