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 […]

Eric Kuan from Google on stage with Gary Illyes and Nathan Johns from Google at PubCon said that Google is still making changes to both the Panda and Penguinalgorithms. Just a month ago we reported that Google occasionally tweaks the Penguin algorithm but for the most part it is on autopilot. Eric has been with Google for over 6 years, […]

The Secure URL label HTTPS will no longer be seen on Google Chrome by September of this year. Google believes that secure websites should be the norm and as such, do not need any more labels. The news was confirmed on May 17 by Google Chrome Security Product Manager Emily Schecter on the company’s official […]

Google’s John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a hangout at the 15:38 mark that Google is indeed testing the mobile first index in the live search results. He did not explain what percentage of searchers are seeing these live test results but I have to imagine it is really small. With this test, Google is not only looking to see […]

Update: As I suspected and wrote below, this seems like something interfering with the ads, see this. Antony Jackson posted a screen shot on Google+ of a new user interface where the search ads and organic search listings kind of blend together. There is this little “Ads X” at the top right of the search […]

Google recently announced a new mobile ranking algorithm it is calling the “speed update”.  Google states the speed update will “only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and only affect a small percentage of queries” Let me begin by saying: page load times are already a huge part of Google’s mobile ranking algorithm. They have […]