Industry News

I am currently in the process of hiring a product manager for my team at Cloudflare. One of the neat things about Cloudflare is that internal candidates are encouraged to reach out to hiring managers to chat with them about the role. That means that I’ve had several really great conversations with colleagues over the past couple of weeks, many of them with folks who are in other parts of the org like BI, customer support, finance, engineering, etc. The question they have is, “how do I move...

I like Mike Hall’s tips for interviewers in his notes about behavioral interviews. The crux of the behavioral interview style is this:

I’d rather know what you’ve done than what you think, and I have adjusted my style a little to help candidates. I try to explain my process up front. “I’m going to ask you about times you did things because I really want to get down to how you work and what your experience is.”

It is, however, very important to realize that adjacent or related...

I’ve followed danah boyd’s work for a long time so when she says something I listen. Danah has been researching teens and technology her entire career. In Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again she weighs in on the “is social media causing the teen mental health crisis?” debate:

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is...

The Google March 2024 core update finished a week ago and Google did not tell us until today. It finished officially on April 19, 2024, and took 45 days to roll out after starting on March 5, 2024. Google also said this helped reduce low-quality and unoriginal content in search results by 45%, which is up from their estimate of 40%.

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

Google's core update is still rolling out over 7 weeks later and yes we are seeing more fluctuations and chatter. Forbes blocked its coupon directory in preparation for the Google site reputation abuse policy. Google said splitting and merging sites takes longer than normal site migrations...

Google has removed the feature to add publications manually to the Google Publisher Center. Instead, publications will be automatically added when Google's algorithms decide to.

Google is testing placing the date in the snippet on the same line as the URL in the snippet. This is instead of placing it before the snippet's description section.

Google is now sharing the Googlebot IP ranges for the User-triggered fetchers. User-triggered fetchers are from Google tools and product functions where the end user triggers a fetch.

Google and Microsoft both reported very good earnings, driving both stock prices up after hours. I like to dive into the ad revenue side, and it looks like Google Ad revenue was up 13% from last year and Microsoft Advertising revenue was up 12% from last year.