Industry News

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 US is considering breaking up Google as a remedy to it being a monopoly...

US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google, out of Bloomberg last night was the big business news from yesterday. How would Google be broken up? Well, they would diversify Android and Chrome and potentially try to force Google to sell "AdWords," they mean Google Ads.

I am hearing reports of some spammers or hackers hijacking some Google Hotel listings by marking some hotels as permanently closed and also changing the phone numbers to WhatsApp numbers. This can be a huge concern for many hotel operators, but I am not sure how widespread the issue is.

We keep trying to understand if Google Search will change, if it will just be AI Overviews or if the change will be more drastic. Well, Google demoed Gemini Research, where Google uses AI to do your research, by curating information across the web to build a document that gives you a detailed researched answer.

When Google announced the new Google Search Console recommendations, one of the examples of the recommendations was to bulk export your data because "Search Console only shows 35% of your performance data." Now, this is not new, we knew Google anonymized way too much of your data in Search Console, but now Google is showing how much in this example report.

Apple Business Connect has added a new feature named Showcase enhancements. A "Showcase" allows you to share up-to-date information with your customers, like seasonal items or promotions. Apple extended these showcases for longer periods and more characters.

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

A Google document that came out of the DOJ trails said that back in 2017, Bing Search was faster than Google was specifically looking at mobile queries. The document was an internal Google document and went through 10 elements of latency.

Google has deactivated all Russian-based AdSense accounts yesterday and will issue July earnings will be disbursed between August 21 and 26. Google added it will attempt to disburse any remaining balance in your account, if you have met the cancellation threshold and have no payment holds, within 60 days.

Google Search is testing miniature, or smaller, knowledge panel cards in the Google Search results. Instead of showing the massive knowledge panel at the top, Google shows this smaller card at the top right of the search results, which leaves the main search results higher at the top left of the page.