The role of search is expanding and diversifying at an accelerating pace. In the age of assistance, search is everywhere and embedded within a range of home devices and smartphones. You can search from more places than ever before, through voice, image or text. A report by Brightedge (my company) reveals that 57 percent of […]

In May of this year, many small businesses lost a number of Google reviews. A month later, Google provided my colleague Mike Blumenthal a statement that confirmed the reviews were not coming back: We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews. The reviews removed were old reviews from anonymous profiles […]

Not only does your Google My Business listing increase your chances of showing up in the Google Local 3-pack, but when your business is searched for by name, Google often shows a Knowledge Panel that displays detailed information about your company. These details are pulled directly from your GMB listing, as well as from information […]

The Fourth of July is tomorrow, but Google has uploaded its Independence Day doodle on the Google US home page a day early. The doodle showcases some of the most-searched-for recipes broken down by state. Google used Google Trends to build this year’s doodle. When you click on the play button on the doodle, you can drill […]

Google said it can take many months for Google to reclassify a web site that was classified as being adult, to not being adult anymore. Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “these things take quite a bit of time to be reviewed and re-evaluated by our algorithms, usually it’s on the order of months.” He […]

Over the past couple of weeks, Google has been replacing the video box in the desktop search results with a new carousel-formatted video box. First reports of this came as early as June 6, but the big change, according to RankRanger, was on June 15. The video carousel box gives searchers a way to click […]

Among the ways that Google is trying to make interactions with the Assistant more natural is enabling follow-up questions and interactions without injecting “Hey Google” each time. At Google’s developer conference in May, the company announced a new feature called “Continued Conversation.” Continued Conversation, which is launching today in the US, allows users to have […]

Google has a new look for blog searches. Searches for blogs now return carousels and rich lists of popular blogs. The new feature which appears in mobile and desktop searches show rich results for queries about blog topics, like “cooking blogs” or “tech blogs.” This is the carousel look for a cooking blogs search: Here […]

According to a report in Financial Times (paywall), the European Commission is set to impose a second major antitrust fine on Google for alleged abuse of power in Android licensing deals with phone makers. The report says EU Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager is “poised to announce the negative finding within weeks . . . marking […]

Today’s Google doodle, an interactive doodle that doubles as a garden gnome video game, is being posted to align with Germany’s Garden Day holiday. “Look amongst the greenery of Germany’s lush gardens and you might spot a red-capped gartenzwerg, or garden gnome,” says Google on it’s Google Doodle blog: “Today’s doodle — just in time […]