Industry News

I’ve been very interested in the rise of the 4-day workweek (4DWW) ever since we adopted it in a previous company and saw the benefits and value it brought to our business. In Do we need to be honest about Fridays? Bruce Daisley makes an interesting observation about how the 4DWW might eventually sneak up on most businesses:

I’ve met several organizations who use Friday as a meeting-free day (to allow team members to chow down on emails and admin). Others tell me that their Fridays are a...

Yes, I’m a relentless fanboy of whatever Paul Ford writes, but this is a truly wonderful post about what makes AI so addictive and impossible to look away from. He frames AI as a technology that truly has no shame because “it possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.” And so:

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to...

I finally read this very long essay about Rewilding the Internet that’s been making the rounds. It’s about 30 mins of your time and in my opinion it’s time well spent.

It’s about what internet-builders can learn from the field of ecology, where the word “rewilding” has a very specific meaning. It’s essentially about systems thinking, which I know a lot of us care about deeply.

Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many...

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 Ads now is testing AI generated performance summaries. Google launched two new Googlebots...

Google announced they are rolling out AI Overviews in the US and many searchers want to turn it off, and some content creators want to opt out of them. Google also announced new AI search features that will roll out soon...

When Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in the US search results and last year when Google launched SGE in labs, SEOs and content creators wanted to know how to prevent their content from showing up in these responses. Well, you can, but only through Google Search controls as I covered in my larger story.

Google Ads continues to roll out AI features within the advertiser console. Now some advertisers are seeing AI summaries of how their ad performance is doing. These AI summaries give you an overview of your Google Ads campaign performance over a specified period.

Google looks like it will discontinue the direct ordering option with the Order with Google button by the end of June 2024. This will impact third-party food delivery sites, such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats. I assume Google will instead link to third parties and not directly integrate with them in the search interface.

Google has added two new Googlebots, Google crawlers, to its crawler list. They include GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, which are part of the GoogleOther category of bots and are used for crawling of binary data for research and development reasons.

For the past few months we have covered the vocal and visual complaints around Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that generally have image thumbnails attached to the search result snippet. Google has responded to the large Google Webmaster Help thread in the forums by saying we know, we are still investigating, follow our guidelines and then locked the thread down.