Most of the major presidential polls were off – some way off. And while Joe Biden appears to be headed for victory, as predicted, it’s by margins considerably smaller than expected. In short, the pollsters blew it, and in a bigger way than in 2016. Every day at Search Engine Land our inboxes are…
Facebook is awash with election misinformation. And so, two days after the U.S. presidential election, it has decided to add “friction” to its spread. So reports the New York Times, which notes that Facebook is considering the bold action of requiring “an additional click or two — before people can share posts and other content.”…
Multiple tech companies announced quarterly earnings on the same day last week, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. Apple is the only company in the “antitrust quartet” that doesn’t formally report ad revenue, although third party estimates argue that Apple might bring in $2 billion this year from search ads. Google, Facebook and Amazon each…
No-context pop culture Twitter accounts are getting a whole lot of context this week, sharing some very pertinent, relatable screenshots amidst the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It’s a bit of wry levity to help claw us through this. Out-of-context Twitter accounts typically post screenshots of television shows without comment, often highlighting the absurdity of particular…
Update: The California Privacy Rights Act did pass on Tuesday. While most people are focused Tuesday on the U.S. presidential election, Californians are voting (or have voted) on ballot proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). Known in some quarters as “CCPA 2.0,” CPRA was intended by its sponsors to expand and…
While most people are focused Tuesday on the U.S. presidential election, Californians are voting (or have voted) on ballot proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). Known in some quarters as “CCPA 2.0,” CPRA was intended by its sponsors to expand and strengthen CCPA. CPRA will probably pass. Polling suggests it’s likely…
Want to learn how to keep returning customers engaged and convert new customers through your Google My Business listing? On October 28, I moderated a Search Engine Journal webinar sponsored by SEMrush and presented by Ross Tavendale, Managing Director at Type A Media. He walked through some simple workflows that small business owners can start…
Artificial intelligence-written articles and copy have been around for several years now, but GPT-3 promises to take AI-produced copy to the next level. GPT-3 is Open AI’s powerful autoregressive language model that is capable of generating human-like natural language. What makes GPT-3 so much better than its predecessors is the size of its training data. GPT-3…
One society’s suffering can only be a company’s growth opportunity for so long. Facebook released its third quarter earnings report Thursday, letting investors around the world know that not even the coronavirus can slow its inexorable march toward riches — it clocked in a cool $21 billion in revenue this quarter alone. There was one…
When the COVID lockdowns began in March, Google local business profiles saw a massive drop-off in directions requests and a corresponding spike in local calls and website clicks (61% increase in calls). Since that time, call volumes fluctuated but, according to CallRail, have now stabilized at levels that are 27% higher than the pre-pandemic peak.…