Industry News

Google is testing an ad format for Google Ads where you swipe over a carousel of images, eventually leading to a map. When you click on the map, it takes you to the Google Business Profile in Google Maps.

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft posted on X this week that BingBot turned 14 years old. Yea, 14 years of crawling the web. Fabrice wrote, "Happy 14th Birthday, BingBot! You've been crawling ð·ï' the web and bringing us the best search results for over a decade. Next year promises even more innovation and excellence! Time to graduate and maximize crawl efficiency."

This is a programming note that Thursday and Wednesday are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Thursday and Wednesday, October 3rd and October 4th...

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

Microsoft announced it is now rolling out the Bing generative search experience and to more sets of informational queries. Also, Bing updated its Deep Search saying it is faster and powered by GPT-4o and some in-house distilled models.

Google has updated its developer documentation to warn about sites using JavaScript-generated Product markup and that the search company recommends putting Product markup in the initial HTML for best results.

This month may have been one of the most volatile Google Search ranking months I reported about ever. Google completed its August 2024 core update, and then we had countless unconfirmed ranking updates, tweaks, or volatility - whatever you want to call it.

Google is testing a dynamic map feature in Google Search that will update the map as you scroll through the location carousel. The location carousel has content like neighborhoods, things to do, transport, airports and more.

Microsoft seems to be testing replacing the hard to see ad label with a longer sponsored label in the Bing Search results. So instead of it saying "ad" next to the search ads, it is testing showing "sponsored" text next to the search ads.

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