In 2011, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s search spam team, was in Washington DC, doing an “educational tour” to explain to US Federal Trade Commission members and congressional staffers that Google’s search results didn’t require government regulation.
Part of his visit included a 89-page slide presentation, called “Search Integrity,” at Google’s Washington, D.C. offices.
Cutts said the same thing that Google had been telling the search marketing community for years – that Google’s results are determined by an algorithm and not tweaked to get particular sites ranking well.
“The only reasons I know of to go in and change [search rankings] manually is for security, a court order or spam. It is impossible to pay for a better ranking.”
Matt Cutts, as quoted in The Washington Post
Read all about it in Mr. Cutts Goes To Washington, Testifies Google Has Integrity.
2022: If you used IndexNow to submit URLs to Microsoft Bing, Microsoft would immediately share those URLs with Yandex.
2022: The privacy focused search engine announced it had surpassed 100 billion all time searches.
2021: Ads mentioning politics, impeachment, the inauguration, and the insurrection at the US Capitol were all being halted.
2020: Google announced it was releasing a broad core algorithm update called the January 2020 Core Update.
2020: The tool could now report unloadable embedded resources, such as external elements included by a page.
2020: Agencies, SEOs, and resellers were not eligible for this program. And the proposed MBP “must not have access to the business listings they are verifying.”
2020: After several months of being live in the Google mobile results, Google launched the new design on desktop.
2020: Microsoft recommended running up to five ads per ad group, including at least one RSA.
2020: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series, he chats with Álvarez about why structured data will be important in the future and his passion for mentoring SEOs.
2018: The animated doodle highlighted Youguang’s work by flipping the Os within Google’s name from Pinyin (Gǔgē) to Chinese characters (谷歌) and led to a search for “Zhou Youguang.”
2017: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2016: A summary of some of the questions, answers and additional confusion around the most recent Google core algorithm update and Panda becoming part of Google’s core ranking signals.
2016: Some users were seeing the new feature on Bing when searching for [speed test] or [internet speed test].
2016: The new feature would anticipate where a user wanted to go and advise how best to get there.
2018: The site offered daily analysis of NCAA basketball teams, predicting whether they would make the tournament and how they would finish.
2015: LinkedIn’s new customized search functionality was designed to help you find people, jobs or posts faster.
2014: Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said his airline has entered a partnership with Google, and was providing the search engine with flight pricing to help build a travel search and comparison tool.
2014: If you conducted a search on Bing, while on the HTTPS URL, it would remain HTTPS and keep your searches secure.
2012: The ability to block web sites from search results disappeared when Google’s Search Plus personalized results format launched.
2012: Four reports all pointed to an overwhelmingly successful fourth quarter in 2011 for major search advertisers in a number of verticals.
2012: The first testing for the roll-out was to commence mid-January and involve up to 10% of Yahoo’s traffic in France, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
2012: So said “people familiar with the situation.”
2012: The new bar added a Popular Now, Weather, Image and Video boxes.
2012: A local search/directory startup said Google crawled its site for local business sales leads and then falsely claimed in cold calls to those businesses it had a partnership with the publisher to sign them up.
2012: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2011: The Czech Republic was one of six countries (along with Russia, Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea) where Google wasn’t the dominant search engine.
2011: Bing was now powering the Yahoo back-end for organic search in Australia, Brazil and Mexico.
2011: Bing added new and used car listings in a self-contained autos-shopping page that kept users within the Bing experience.
2011: From November to December 2010, Bing.com saw a 5% increase in search activity, while Bing-powered searches also rose 2%
2011: Under the new game plan, Google was targeting Chinese firms to advertise on its dominant overseas search market, a business which already constitutes about half of its China revenues.
2011: A 120 question document sought “to ascertain whether Google manipulated search results and used its popular platform to keep business and disadvantage rivals in online advertising and Internet search.”
2011: Topsy’s Social Modules were embeddable widgets that brought Twitter content to any website.
2010: For sites hosted on a blogspot.com, wordpress.com or similar type of domain, Google wanted advertisers to show the subdomain portion of the domain, in addition to the main domain.
2010: It wasn’t just about the number of Twitter followers, but also who the “reputed followers” were, according to Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow.
2010: A sampling of a wide variety of reactions and responses to the news that Google could potentially pull out of China if it cannot operate without censorship.
2010: Gains by Google, a minor gain by AOL, and declines for Yahoo and Bing.
2010: One of Google’s more vocal critics says the company should cut its ties with InfoSpace over what he called “a particularly insidious kind of click fraud” that involves a fairly complex combination of paid ads, affiliate traffic brokering, and spyware.
2010: Anyone searching for the official Google blog post about Google deciding to leave China over censorship was unable to find it on China’s leading search engine, Baidu.
2009: A 20-minute video where Cutts went over what he considered to be virtual “blight” (link spam, open landing pages and hacking). Cutts also showed how to think like a spammer.
2009: Bartz was praised for her management and deal brokering skills but had never run an internet company, and had no advertising background.
2009: Cutts said these pages might run afoul of Google’s webmaster guidelines, and gave specific instructions for reporting this kind of page to Google’s spam team.
2009: In retrospect, it appeared that relative search query volumes (Obama vs. McCain) did presage the outcome of the November election. And it appeared they predicted the recession.
2009: Coming soon: A NASCAR search engine? Ask also becomes the official search engine of NASCAR.
2009: Once selected, the Transit Layer would display public transportation lines/routes for the area you were viewing.
2009: How one agency created animated racing ASCII cars in the browser address bar using JavaScript.
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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