SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 15, 2022
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
If you are not happy with the latest Google product reviews update, then you can let Google know with examples. Google has fixed the “validate fix” feature in Search Console. Google Discover now can show author names over site names. Microsoft’s IndexNow is growing a lot, in fact, 7% of the new URLs clicked on were via IndexNow. Bing Shopping added coupons, promotions, price history, and ethical annotations. Google spoke about what to do with old event pages. Finally, posted a vlog with Sarah Burke on GA4 and dashboards.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Search Console Validate Fix Now Back
Google has reenabled the validate fix feature in Google Search Console just now. It was not there a couple of hours ago and has been not working since the beginning of this month but now it is back. - Bing Shopping Searches Gains Coupons, Promotions, Price History & More
Microsoft Bing Shopping has officially added a lot of the features we noticed early such as coupons and promotions, price history, and ethical choice annotations, the company announced. - Google: What To Do With Old Event Pages
What do you do if you run an event and the event is over, do you keep the webpage live, do you redirect it, do you just delete it and 404 the page? The answer is it depends, as you’d imagine. - IndexNow Is Growing But Should You Pay Attention?
Microsoft’s IndexNow protocol is growing and the search company keeps investing in it, despite Google not adopting it – yet. Microsoft said that more than 16 million websites are publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API. - Google Discover With Author Names Instead Of Site Name
Google Discover can now show the author name of a specific story instead of showing the site name under the story. I personally do not use Google Discover much but a couple of savvy Google Discover users noticed this over the weekend. - Are Not Happy With The Last Google Product Reviews Update? Tell Google.
The last Google product reviews update, the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update, was an interesting one. It felt, based on SEO and webmaster feedback, that it just didn’t hit the mark in terms of quality relative to past Product reviews updates. If you have examples of where and how Google got it wrong, you can let Google know about it. - Vlog #185: Sarah Burke On The Benefits Of Google Analytics 4 & Why Data Dashboards Are Important
In part one, we learned about Sarah Burke, the Data and Analytics Manager at Cypress North. We also spoke about some of the differences between Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics 3. Here we talk about the benefits of Google Analytics 4. - A Google Shadow
Here is a photo of a real Google shadow that I found on Instagram. Not much more to say about this.
Other Great Search Threads:
- Thanks for flagging this, Chris. We agree that’s not the expected experience, and good news is the team is already working to address it. It might take a little bit to upd, AdsLiaison on Twitter
- It’s hard to say, but it’s important to keep in mind that Google just doesn’t index every page on the web, even if it’s submitted directly. If there’s no error, it might, John Mueller on Twitter
- DA is a proxy metric to help you understand the strength of your link profile and your competitiveness with other sites. Google doesn’t use DA, Moz doesn’t give DA data to Google, and gaming DA is usele, Dr. Pete Meyers on Twitter
- Usually an XML sitemap file is for URLs that you want to have indexed., John Mueller on Twitter
- Google rewrites the title link for more than 50 percent of the search results according to a little test I’ve just made for 400 search results. Only a small percentage of search results is truncated., SEO Sudwest on Twitter
- I’m happy to take a look, but if you take something with few good results, a collection of things that just happens to also match those words is common., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Other Search
Feedback:
Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, you can follow us on Facebook and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search People Cards Visible In US

Back in 2020, Google Search introduced a feature named people cards. It was only available in India but now it seems like it might be expanding, as I can now see it in the United States.
Brian Freiesleben’s card, which he created when it was first announced by spoofing his location to be in India, is now showing up as a people card for searchers in the United States. Personally, I was able to bring it up on my mobile device in New York.
Here is a screenshot he shared of this on Twitter:
He said, “I found my name now triggers a ‘people card’. This was introduced in Google India back in 2020. I spoofed my location back then to create the card and now (finally) it’s appearing.”
Glenn Gabe was able to replicate it as well:
Thanks!
Man, I have tried to kill that flickr page so many times…it pops back like a weed every time. This is new motivation to try to unlock that account and delete it haha.
— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) February 3, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Bard, It’s ChatGPT Feature, To Trusted Testers

Well, we knew it was coming and here it is, Bard – Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Google is now having its trusted testers test out Bard and will soon roll it out more widely to users in Google Search and others products in the coming weeks, Google announced. It is not called Apprectice Bard but rather Bard.
I covered this when the news broke at Search Engine Land and as I pointed out, right now, Google does not have an answer for how to attribute or link to answers Bard generates – yet. But I do suspect Google will have some answer for it. I also mentioned that Google has been writing knowledge panels using AI and other methods since 2018 and said then it is not stealing. So it will be interesting to see what Google ends up doing here.
Bard is Google’s experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, where Google can answer questions that might not have one right answer. Google said they will roll this out more widely in the coming weeks but for now, only trusted testers (who is outsourced to a third-party company) will be able to play with it.
Google said, “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.”
Here is a screenshot they shared of how it might look in Google Search:
This is how it might look like in Google Search (without the attribution part…).
This is the Bard direct interface, not in search:
I am super excited to see how this evolves at Google, Bing and others.
It is not too far off from the leaks of the Bing ChatGPT interface.
Here is Sundar Pichai’s tweets:
2/ Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Today we’re opening Bard up to trusted external testers. pic.twitter.com/QPy5BcERd6
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
4/ As people turn to Google for deeper insights and understanding, AI can help us get to the heart of what they’re looking for. We’re starting with AI-powered features in Search that distill complex info into easy-to-digest formats so you can see the big picture then explore more pic.twitter.com/BxSsoTZsrp
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
5/ Developers can soon try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, our goal is to create a set of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
Here is some of the SEO community reaction:
Yeah you would think that making statements like “some say this” and “others say that” would be substantiated with, IDK, a link to the source. Just an idea. https://t.co/P5xvGvAv1V
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023
Bard sounds like 🤮
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023
Bard: What you get when you let AI name itself. https://t.co/todOZBbnCE
— Greg Finn (@gregfinn) February 6, 2023
Oh, bizarre. When the ChatGPT buzz began, I remarked that we’ll never get the Irish bards again with robots doing the thinking for us. How glib is Google naming this after humans who spent 7 years training to recite hundreds of poems + stories? And how weird for me to see it.
— Miriam Ellis (@Miriam_Ellis_) February 6, 2023
Attribution is a must – I hope this is not where Google is heading – this is not the way https://t.co/PRH2LSKjR7
— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) February 6, 2023
ESPECIALLY if the AI model charges for its services.
No, you can’t have my written work to use as you see fit for your paid service.
Or even to train your models. It’s my work? My written words?
The tech moves so fast this stuff takes time to catch up, but it’s important.
— Julie F Bacchini (@NeptuneMoon) February 6, 2023
It’s a little concerning to see that the screenshots Google shared do not show websites as sources used for the AI generated answer.
This is likely because the answer is generated from “the breath of the world’s knowledge.”
Drawing from the knowledge graph perhaps? pic.twitter.com/OVwuWScnDt
— Dr. Marie Haynes🐼 (@Marie_Haynes) February 6, 2023
Content creators that monetise via page views might be the biggest losers
— @[email protected] (@davidiwanow) February 6, 2023
Feel sorry for the dude who wrote the great in-depth article on what’s the easiest to learn, the guitar or the piano!
— Matthew Marley👨🏻💻 (@matthewmarley) February 6, 2023
Why would anyone want to publish blogs after that?
What’s the point of publishing original articles ?
Google will crawl my article, learn from it , serve the solution to its customers as its own. https://t.co/wSwTld3qRJ— Fardun (@FardunRahman) February 6, 2023
In a world of AI search engine wars, the brand, unique perspective and insights & quality fact checking with references are becoming key to survive. Structured data & information have now become a commodity https://t.co/IpcRQFy56e
— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) February 6, 2023
Google Bard – a rival to ChatGPT
The end of SEO websites maybe. https://t.co/ZWowpV5DUg
— Liaqat Hussain 🇵🇰 (@Edwardian842) February 6, 2023
And from now on, whenever I hear “Google Bard,” I’ll think of the OG. #LegendOfVoxMachina #Criticalrole https://t.co/PuYfJaHaAE pic.twitter.com/SCr1YWsUZO
— Ian Lurie 🇺🇦 @[email protected] (@IanLurie) February 6, 2023
Going to be a busy few months… #GoogleBard https://t.co/aEKFLlmMeF
— Will O’Hara 👨🏽💻 (@willohara) February 6, 2023
I think Bard is just an iteration of Lambda and at last year’s Google product expert summit the product manager of Google brain did a presentation of lambda and it was awesome. It was like Google maps times 10
— Molly Youngblood (@mygeigermeister) February 6, 2023
Brain buzzing with all the search news and announcements this week! SEOs cannot sleep. What a time to be alive! The future is bright 🚀
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 7, 2023
It’s too early to say, and your feedback can help to shape the next steps. What would you find useful and appropriate?
— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023
Make sure to send feedback. With bigger changes like this, it’ll probably take a few iterations before things settle down.
— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023
Also, make sure to check out the roundup at Techmeme.
Forum discussion at Twitter, WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Most SEOs Think Yahoo Won’t Be Able To Compete In Search

As you know, Yahoo is planning a come back to search with a new way of thinking about Yahoo Search. What that means, we don’t know yet, but we do know Yahoo is thinking hard about how they can compete. Greg Sterling ran a Twitter poll asking if Yahoo has a shot at it, and most say, nope – Yahoo Search is dead on arrival.
The poll on Twitter asked, “Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?” It received a nice number of responses, 631 responses. The results were not too optimistic.
- 43.7% said nope, dead on arrival
- 26.6% said depends on the UI/UX
- 29.6% said yes, now is the time
Here is that poll:
Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?
— Greg Sterling 🇺🇦 (@gsterling) January 30, 2023
Personally, I think Yahoo has a good shot at it, better than most other companies. But time will tell and I am very much looking forward to seeing what Yahoo Search comes out with.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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