At its virtual SearchOn event Thursday, Google made a range of announcements about how it’s making search more sophisticated and user friendly. The company also announced that it now uses its natural language understanding BERT algorithm on almost every query to better understand search intent. Many of the announcements shared the common underlying theme that…
Google is testing ads for local businesses in Google Maps auto-suggest search results. Thibault Adda, local search specialist at Darden Restaurants, noticed and tweeted about it Thursday. As he typed a search for “Seafood restaurant,” an ad for the seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster appeared in the auto-suggest results before he completed the search query,…
Among the slew of changes to search Google announced Thursday, we wanted to delve deeper into the passage-based indexing announcement. Passage-based indexing updates. “Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right,” said Google, “since sometimes the single sentence that answers your question might be buried deep in a web page. We’ve recently made…
BERT powers almost every single English based query done on Google Search, the company said during its virtual Search on 2020 event Thursday. That’s up from just 10% of English queries when Google first announced the use of the BERT algorithm in Search last October. In December 2019, Google expanded the use of BERT to…
Google said it has disabled the “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console. The feature has been disabled “in order to make some infrastructure changes.” Google said the feature should return in the coming weeks. The announcement. Google posted this announcement on Twitter: We have disabled the “Request Indexing” feature…
Google announced a new feature for Podcasters named Google Podcast Manager. Podcast Manager allows podcasters to see how well their podcasts are performing in Google Search. What Podcast Manager does. Google Podcast Manager enables “podcasters can see impressions and clicks for Google Podcasts results that appear in Search, as well as top discovered episodes and…
Scratch that: Facebook’s 28-day attribution window lives, for now In response to advertiser feedback, Facebook will not move forward with a test to remove the default 28-day attribution window for advertisers. Gil David of Run DMG shared the news on LinkedIn, commenting “Facebook demonstrates that they do actually listen to advertisers.” He cited the company’s…
Amazon has rolled out the ability for eligible advertisers to add their brand logo and customize the headline in Sponsored Display ads. The customized Sponsored Display units can run on product description pages, customer reviews, shopping results pages and under the Featured Offer. The ads render responsively to fit inventory units on the web, mobile…
A couple of weeks ago we reported on a number of indexing bugs with Google Search. Google has updated us on Twitter with a status update on those bugs. Mobile-indexing bug. The mobile-indexing bug is now 99% resolved, with almost all the URLs being restored. The mobile-indexing bug was when Google failed to select any…
Yelp announced two initiatives designed to fight racism and promote diversity and inclusion among local businesses. The company expanded a relationship with non-profit consortium Open to All to make training resources available “for small and medium-sized businesses to uplevel their diversity and inclusion practices.” The other initiative could prove more controversial. Yelp said it will…