Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16

Indonesia just announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, following a similar ban in Australia. On Friday, Indonesia’s minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said in a speech shared online that the ban will begin on March 28. The rationale, according to a translation by the New York Times, is…

The Verified Source Pack Agents Trust First via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

Structured data helped machines interpret pages. It reduced ambiguity. It made entities and attributes legible to crawlers that were otherwise guessing. Agents change the job because they do not just interpret pages. They decide, summarize, recommend, and sometimes execute. That means they need more than “this page is about X.” They need “this is the…

Google Zero Is A Lie

There is a pervasive narrative doing the rounds in the publishing industry called “Google Zero.” This narrative, embraced by many industry leaders, poses that traffic from Google – Search and Discover – will decline and eventually become negligible. This Google Zero narrative is entirely false, and extremely dangerous. And I’m going to explain why. When…

Information Retrieval Part 4 (Sigh): Grounding & RAG

When we’re talking about grounding, we mean fact-checking the hallucinations of planet destroying robots and tech bros. If you want a non-stupid opening line, when models accept they don’t know something, they ground results in an attempt to fact check themselves. Happy now? TL;DR LLMs don’t search or store sources or individual URLs; they generate…

Google’s Asset Guidance & Ad Scheduling Updates, Microsoft Negatives – PPC Pulse via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

Welcome to PPC Pulse weekly news review. This week’s focus includes asset guidance, budget pacing, and search controls across Google and Microsoft Ads. Google reinforced the importance of asset variety as Search experiences evolve. It also confirmed updates to how budget pacing works for certain campaigns using ad scheduling. Meanwhile, Microsoft launched self-serve negative keyword…