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.

Google said it is working on surfacing more heartful helpful content...

Last week we reported how Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said how they are looking for ways to better promote sites that were hit by that helpful content update in September. Now, over the weekend, John Mueller from Google added, "the team working on this is explictly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update."

Google was asked where Google's Danny Sullivan and John Mueller get their information from when responding to search and ranking-related questions. Sullivan responded directly to the engineers who code those ranking systems at Google.

Google may be bringing comments to the Notes on Google Search (and Discover) feature. Notes on Search came last November as a labs feature in Google Search and Google Discover. Google recently tested a new button for the notes feature in Search. Now Google may be testing comments on Notes.

Google has updated the Google Search Labs to say that Notes on Search now "ends soon." As a reminder, last November Google rolled out as a labs the Notes feature in Google Search and Google Discover.

Google has been rolling out AI Overviews in its search results since last week and more and more searchers are super unhappy that there is no way to turn off the AI Overviews. Michael Schechter, a Vice President at Microsoft, shared a screenshot in Bing, on how you can turn off Copilot responses in Bing Search with the click of a button.

I am in the process of hiring for a couple of roles at Cloudflare, so I’ve been talking to a lot of candidates over the past few weeks. I noticed a few trends along the way, so I thought I’d share a quick list of tips for anyone who is currently in the job market. This is obviously just one hiring manager’s opinion, but hopefully there’s something helpful for folks here! Fill out your LinkedIn profile. So many people have empty LinkedIn profiles that just show their roles with no other...

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...