Industry News

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the Passover holiday. Passover is on Tuesday and Wednesday...

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

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search "needs very few links to rank pages."

Google is testing showing answers in the Discussions and Forums section within the search results. Google will show the question and then add a shaded box with one of the selected answers under the question.

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a reminder, Google will enforce that new policy on May 5th both algorithmically and through manual actions.

Google is testing showing a "Post" button in the carousel of buttons in the Google Business Profile local listing panel. So when you view your owned business in Google Search, you may see a "Post" button near the call, directions, share, and save. There is also an "Edit" button there.

It is good to have choices but too many choices might not be good, said some wise man. Well, here is Google giving you 16 choices of bikes in the shopping ad spot at the top of the Google Search results.

I recently mentioned how I like to draw it until it works when I’m ramping up on a new system. Clint Byrum says it so much better in his post System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load. First, this bit resonated with me because it’s exactly the situation I currently find myself in:

Having joined just a few months ago, I was overwhelmed about 5 minutes into the meeting. The individual words and concepts all made sense. JSON parsing slow. Network transit treacherous....

Maybe it’s my age showing but I’m with Gruber on this one:

I would argue, strenuously, that the phone is the natural AI device. It already has: always-on networking, cameras, a screen, microphones, and speakers. Everyone owns one and almost everyone takes theirs with them almost everywhere they go.

Bit of a clickbaity title, but there’s some good advice for product managers in this article about making sure the organization understands that product is a profit center, not a cost center. This is the most important point:

Directly tie product to revenue. One way to do this is revenue attribution. In most companies, revenue and revenue growth is tied to marketing or sales. Making the point that product provided the thing to sell and the features that draw in customers is difficult to...