Google may have had two search ranking algorithm updates, one around May 9th and one around May 3rd. Google began its site reputation abuse policy enforcement this week with manual actions, and it is not about linking. Google said sites may recover from the helpful content update. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, responded
If you search for [flag GIF] on Google, click on the "waiving" refinement, you are taken to images of Nazi flags. I waited a full week to report on this, a full week from when Google acknowledged the issue and it is still an issue.If you search for [flag gif], you will see a refinement to show you waiving flags:If you click on "waiving" Google Search shows you Nazi flags:This was posted on Mastodon on April 24th and Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded shortly after saying,...
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, was interviewed by Emily Chang at Bloomberg before the big Google I/O event. They talked a lot about a lot of things, but there was 25-second clip where they spoke about core search quality. As you can imagine, he didn't say much but he did respond.Emily Chang asked at the 8:10 mark into the video interview:Some leading computer scientists have said Search is getting worse, more SEO spam, et cetera. Do you see their point?Sundar Pichai replied:Anytime there's a...
OpenAI is trying to snatch the limelight from Google; we have heard this one before, remember? I’ll remind you, in February Google announced Gemini replacing Bard, but just within a week later, OpenAI announced something revolutionary, their text-to-video generator Sora, taking all the limelight from Google. But it seems like OpenAI is leveling up this […]
It seems Google has fully removed the number of results found, the results count, from the Google Search results page. It was removed from the Google Search Generative Experience last June and Google has been testing removing it for ages but not it seems fully gone.Update; it appears to still be on the page but you need to click on "tools" to reveal the number.Here is what I see for any query - it is missing the number of results, the results count:Here is what it use to show:This also seems to...
Google is testing a new button to add a note to the search results. As a reminder, Google launched Notes in Google Search and Discover last November as a labs feature. The new note button is much smaller and just has an icon of a notebook with a plus sign within it.This change was spotted by Khushal Bherwani, who shared screenshots with me on X.Here is the test, smaller button:Here is the older original version:There were some speculation that Notes will go away this month but Google seems to...
Google has brought its popular Circle to Search tool to Apple's iPhone range – sort of. The web giant announced Circle to Search at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked back in January, introducing a brand new way to search the web using whatever's on the screen at the time. While the feature has arrived on a number of Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices since, we figured it'd be a while until it arrived on iOS – if ever. However, an official update to the Google Lens app on the App Store has...
The U.S. Department of Justice hammered Google over search ad price manipulation and more in its closing statement on search advertising.
To preserve the usefulness of its rankings as early adopters defect to ChatGPT, Bing, and Perplexity, Google just completed rolling out the largest algorithm update in the company’s history. But search marketing experts and business owners say spam is still commanding top-ranking positions, calling into question Google’s ability to deliver the best search results in the brave new world of generative AI. “I’ve never seen as much spam in Google’s results so blatantly in top positions,” says...
OpenAI could be working on their own AI search engine that could be announced on the 9th of May, so watch out Google!
Google Search is testing custom filters and pre-define search filter templates. It appears you can save your custom filters and reuse those filters for future searches. This is showing up for a limited number of searchers.This was reported by Ben Schoon on 9to5Google who shared a number of screenshots. Ben wrote, "The filters can add specific keywords or filter using specific websites to help you better find what you’re looking for. You can also set a filter to search for specific file types...
Google has for a long time used AI to write some knowledge panels. But now Google is labeling some of these AI written knowledge panels with "Al overviews are experimental" as a disclaimer. This may show up for both SGE and non-SGE results, I believe.Johannes Beus at Sistrix posted about this, sharing this screenshot:You can see that one shows the AI written section and one does not. I tried it myself logged in to SGE and it did not give me the AI written knowledge panel:That being said, I do...