Industry News

Almost a year ago, we reported how Bing Search went from circle favicons in the search results to square favicons in the search results. Now, we are seeing Bing testing going back to the circle formatted favicons.

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

Google has updated its site reputation abuse policy to expand what is included in abuse. It now includes third-party content that has first-party involvement or content oversight. Google also dropped a mention of the starkly different content algorithm but made no mention that site reputation abuse is enforced algorithmically'"so it must still be only through manual actions.

Google announced new shopping features through Google Lens to help with in-store shopping and local shopping. Google said, "Google Lens can quickly show you product insights tailored to the store you're in. Just snap a photo to find product information, similar products in-stock, whether a store's price is competitive and shopper reviews."

Google has updated its guide to Google Search ranking systems to mention at the top of the page that it uses both page-level and site-wide signals for search rankings. There was a debate on this after the Google creator summit about Google possibly saying they only have page level signals, so this may clear things up a bit.

Is OpenAI, its ChatGPT service, taking market share from Google? Well, maybe. Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro posted his assumptions based on a mix of data from SimilarWeb and Datos that says ChatGPT's current market share is 4.33% - that is from October 2024 data.

Microsoft is testing categorizing the videos within its Bing video search results. Bing's video search interface can show at the top a featured video for the query, then trending videos related to the query, then short videos, then a related category of videos, followed by the normal video thumbnails.

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

Over a year and a half ago, Google told us they would be dropping the page experience report from Google Search Console in the "coming months." Well, it took many "coming months" for it to happen and now the page experience report is no longer available within Google Search Console.

Google has begun testing removing EU-based news publishers in Google News, Google Search, and Google Discover for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain (not France). Google is doing this to provide data on the impact this will make for these publishers if this would be rolled out to 100% of users.