Google reported earnings last night and their ad revenue not only slowed but was technically lower year over year. Google’s ad revenue was down about 3.6%, while total revenue was up just around 1%.

Here is the snippet from the earnings report showing that:

Remember, Microsoft reported earnings the week prior and showed slowed growth but still growth. Microsoft Bing Ads grew 10% last quarter.

Here is a look at Google’s earnings numbers for the past 3 years:

You can see that Q4 2021 was higher than Q4 2022!

Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google, said: “Our Q4 consolidated revenues were $76 billion, up 1% year over year, or up 7% in constant currency, and $283 billion for the full year 2022, up 10%, or up 14% in constant currency. We have significant work underway to improve all aspects of our cost structure, in support of our investments in our highest growth priorities to deliver long-term, profitable growth.”

Hence the mass Google layoffs to cut costs and increase profit. Keep in mind, Google’s profit was insane – $18 billion, that is $1 billion in profit per week! Sure, Google’s net income was down 34% year over year, so I get Wall Street.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Owen Yin shared some screenshots of what he said he saw on the Microsoft Bing website. It looks like the beta version of the upcoming ChatGPT features that we are all expecting Bing to announce in the coming weeks (maybe even this coming Tuesday).

Owen shared these screenshots on Twitter and then posted more details on Medium.

Here is the home page screenshot that widens and enlarges the search box and says “Ask me anything”:

Here is his screenshot of the results, the answers being returned:

And here is the GIF he made of this:

It would not surprise me if this is being tested in the wild by Microsoft Bing, as all the evidence leads to a big announcement about this type of feature being released sometime in the next week or so.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide clearer details around how Google Search and canonicalization works.

The three sections include:

All of this use to be on a single help page, which you can review on the Wayback Machine over here to compare.

With this, Gary Illyes from Google dropped another LinkedIn tip on the topic of canonicalization, he wrote:

Friday ramble: you can stack canonicalization signals to strengthen that hint.

You have a rel=canonical pointing from A to B, but A is HTTPS, it’s in your hreflang clusters, all your links are pointing to A, and A is included in your sitemaps instead of B. Which one should search engines pick as canonical, A or B?

If you just change the URLs from A to B in your sitemaps and hreflang clusters, combined with that rel=canonical it might already be enough to tip over canonicalization to B. Change the links also, and you have an even greater chance to convince search engines about your canonical preference.

Recently, Gary also mentioned to use absoluate URLs for rel-canonical.

So check out these new docs and learn a bit more on canonicalization and Google Search.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.