Category: google

Seen as a Pinterest competitor, it’s something potentially broader and even older. To the extent that tech pundits continue to compare Google’s new Keen search and social discovery site to Pinterest, and users also think of it that way, it’s probably destined to fail. Google famously doesn’t promote and ultimately shutters most of these “experiments.” Need to get away from Pinterest. For Keen to survive, let alone succeed, Google will need to reframe and differentiate it from Pinterest — as a tool for persistent, personalized search and as a broad content repository for…

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“More than 25 billion pages we discover each day are spammy,” the company revealed. Google discovers more than 25 billion spammy pages a day, according to its annual webspam report released Tuesday. The company also published a companion post on why it’s important to keep spam out of search results. The definition of spam. “We define ‘spam’ as using techniques that attempt to mimic [high quality content] signals without actually delivering on the promise of high quality content, or other tactics that might prove harmful to searchers,” the post reads. A more comprehensive list of…

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Jerry Dischler becomes the new head of Google Ads, Gomes takes over Google Education, while Google veteran Jen Fitzpatrick takes on engineering. Google announced several major personnel changes Thursday. They involve search, engineering and ads and the internal promotion of some Google veterans to new roles: Prabhakar Raghavan, Jerry Dischler, Jen Fitzpatrick and Ben Gomes. Ben Gomes moves from Search to Education Gomes isn’t leaving Google; he’ll be taking on a new role connected to various Google education and learning initiatives: Google for Education, Google Scholar and education search, as well as Google Arts…

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Advertisers will soon be able to run queries on same-day impression data. Google’s Ads Data Hub, the analytics and measurement platform for Google campaign data, announced upcoming enhancements Thursday. It also confirmed it is beta testing audience activation for display campaigns. The company said it has been updating the infrastructure that underpins Ads Data Hub (ADH) to be able to scale it to more customers and simplify querying. Closer to real-time analysis. Google said it has reduced latency from 24-48 hours down to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google…

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Simple wins out. Image extensions and dynamic image extension betas will continue. Gallery ads, the splashy, image-driven format that Google introduced last year, will be phasing out. Instead, Google will focus its other image beta, image extensions. Google is informing Gallery ad beta testers that the format will sunset beginning in August. The ads featured a large carousel of images. The format has worked for the automotive industry with the auto ad unit, but didn’t gain enough traction with other verticals. Whereas Gallery ads required setting up a whole new ad format and…

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Local Inventory Ads gain prominence with “In store” mobile experience and “Curbside pickup” option. “Curbside pickup” badges are now appearing on eligible Local Inventory Ads in Google Shopping One area where Google has an edge over Amazon? Local retail. In response to COVID-19 restrictions, Google has been giving local businesses more messaging options such as special store hours, pickup and delivery options and more in Google My Business. Now, it has also enabled “Curbside pickup” badges for Local Inventory Ads. Curbside pickup. Google has been piloting the “Curbside pickup” feature with a small group…

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This year,the company says it has removed “tens of millions” of COVID-19 related ads. Last year, Google says it took down 2.7 billion so-called bad ads for violating the company’s ad policies, according to its annual report released Thursday. That’s up from the 2.3 billion bad ads Google reported taking down in 2018. The number of ad accounts Google terminated remained relatively flat from the previous year at nearly one million. Publisher network. Google also noted that it terminated the accounts of more than 1.2 million publishers and removed ads from over 21 million web…

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Apple’s Safari web browser joins the Tor browser as one of only two that fully block all third-party cookies. The move has been a long time coming, and Safari has been gradually adding more features that limit the overall effectiveness of third-party cookies for tracking. As a result, in a WebKit blog post, the developers downplay the change as not a big deal, although they do highlight some of the significant benefits the move brings. One of the biggest advantages is disabling login fingerprinting. Login fingerprinting is a technique that…

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Google had sought to avoid paying copyright licensing fees by getting publishers to waive them in exchange for being included in search results. Google must pay to display news content in France. That’s the decision of French antitrust authorities, according a Bloomberg report on April 9. The antitrust regulator has given Google three months to work out a deal with French publishers. No pricing or licensing framework has yet been determined. Google told Bloomberg that it would comply with the decision and that the parties have already entered into negotiations. A significant…

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A last reminder to switch to schema.org markup before April 6 to maintain rich result eligibility. Beginning April 6, data-vocabulary.org structured data markup will be ineligible for Google rich results. Site owners must switch to schema.org markup if they want to maintain Google rich result eligibility. The company announced the coming change in January. Why we care If you haven’t converted to schema markup for your structured data, your rich results will disappear from the search results page after April 6. That could mean a loss in organic visibility and traffic.…

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