Industry News

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

Google Discover is testing and maybe rolling out an option to "Tailor your feed." This allows you to tailor the feed with "Say in your own words what you want to see," and Google will try to figure it out.

If you submitted a review appeal within Google Business Profiles it will likely take longer than normal to hear back. Google's review appeals are delayed and Google cannot provide a specific response timeframe for pending cases.

Google is testing extremely long and expandable search result snippet descriptions in the search results. These are also AI-generated snippets, which we've seen before, but not this long. This goes on for eight lines of text.

Google has updated its Manage customer reviews help documentation to expand and clarify the "Understand what happens to your replies" section. It now specifies why a business reply to a review may be hold, how long it takes and more.

Microsoft is testing the ability to upload an image directly within the Bing search bar. You click on a plus sign and Bing shows you "search with an image" and "make an image." I get the search with an image feature but why add generative AI features, like make an image, in this search bar?

Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the...

This has been my experience with MCP servers as well. As useful as I think my Last.fm MCP server is, I can’t see it every having more than a dozen users. But internal company servers are massively useful:

MCP is being used especially heavily by internal data and platform teams to give internal users access to systems. These are systems that these users perhaps already had access to, but it was either too complex or too broad, or needed a lot of documentation or special skills to use....

Will Larson has a good post about how they’re adopting AI at his company. The process is interesting, but this is the part that jumped out at me:

My biggest fear for AI adoption is that they can focus on creating the impression of adopting AI, rather than focusing on creating additional productivity. Optics are a core part of any work, but almost all interesting work occurs where optics and reality intersect.

It’s really hard to figure out if AI tools are (1) helping teams ship...

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...