SEARCHENGINES

Google Drops FLoC For Topics API

Published

8 months ago

January 27, 2022

Surprise, surprise – Google has decided to drop FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), its cookie alternative, with something called Topics API. The Topics API will use browsing topics into 300 or so categories. Yep, FLoC is a FLoP.

Here is a good summary from Ginny Marvin of Google:

2/4 The browser determines a handful of topics like Fitness or Travel based on the past week’s browsing history. When the user visits a participating site, the browser shares 3 topics, one from each of the past 3 weeks, with the site & its advtg partners to serve relevant ads.
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) January 25, 2022

4/4 What’s next: Chrome will launch a trial soon for website developers and the advtg industry to test & provide feedback on Topics. We’ll also have more to share on FLEDGE & other proposals later this week. Check out the Topics API technical explainer: https://t.co/YzTLgPJRue
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) January 25, 2022

Here is how Google described it “with Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like Fitness or Travel & Transportation, that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history.” “Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted,” the company added. “Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers. When you visit a participating site, Topics picks just three topics, one topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners. Topics enables browsers to give you meaningful transparency and control over this data, and in Chrome, we’re building user controls that let you see the topics, remove any you don’t like or disable the feature completely.”

Here is a video that explains it:

Here is an example illustrations of what you can see about 3rd party cookies (left) vs Topics (right). In Chrome, Google plans to make Topics easier to recognize and manage for users.

Google delayed its plans to launch FLoC and lots of companies were planning on blocking FLoC anyway. So this is Google’s pivot.

You can see the technical Topics API details on Github if you want to review it. George wrote up more details on Search Engine Land and you can see the Techmeme roundup on this big news as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Related Topics:api drops floc Google Topics

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SEARCHENGINES

Daily Search Forum Recap: September 29, 2022

Published

13 hours ago

September 30, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

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.

Google had their Search On event yesterday and it was a lot of small announcements that can help searchers in a big way. Google Ads continues to have latency issues. Google said you should really avoid changing URLs. Google Posts may have an issue with submissions. Microsoft Bing is testing traffic analysis in the search results.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

All The Google Announcements From Search On 2022

We had another Google Search On event yesterday and in case you missed it or you simply do not want to read through a lot of fluff, here is the short version. Note, I am pretty sure we covered tests of all of these announcements in the past at this site, so everything should look familiar.

Google Ads Continues To Suffer From Latency Issues

Google Ads continues to suffer from ongoing latency issues – mostly from the Google Ads console. This is the place advertisers go in and manage their ads. It has become a joke about how the console can slow down and become almost unusable.

Google Really Wants You To Avoid Changing URLs Just For SEO Reasons

Google’s John Mueller has put down some strong language against changing your URLs for SEO reasons alone. He basically said in most cases, changing URLs will have a negative impact on SEO and that you probably should not change URLs just for SEO reasons.

Bing Tests Traffic Analysis In Search Results Snippets

Microsoft Bing is testing displaying more details in the page insights overlay feature in search. Now Bing is showing traffic analysis, like monthly visitors, the geo-location of those visitors, how they found your site and more.

Google Posts Submit Button Not Working For Some

Over the past 24 hours or so, there has been a ton of complaints that the Google Posts submit button is not working. I personally tested it and it seems to work for me, but a Google My Business help thread has tons of complaints about the Google Posts not submitting.

Google Ballroom Dancing

Okay, this might not be ballroom dancing, I know very little about dancing, but you can see a video below of these Googlers dancing. The post on Instagram says it is during a lunch break.

Other Great Search Threads:

According to some documents, Google was founded on September 27, 1998 (actually it was the 4th). But according to hard evidence, Google signed its first datacenter contract on September 25, 1998., Urs Holzle on Twitter

I replied to another thread, but I suspect there’s just a bug here. We had something similar happen earlier this year with image search when time restricted, it showed very few images when there were more. Nothing, Danny Sullivan on Twitter

I’m not aware of that going away. However, real-time would imply that it’s not 3-4 months, but rather ongoing, John Mueller on Twitter

If a page is not indexed, how can its content be used for indexing? In practice, it’s more nuanced (there are very temporary edge cases), but I would assume noindexed page, John Mueller on Twitter

Searching for [dart mission] on Google is pretty fun today., Danny Sullivan on Twitter

Internet outages are happening more frequently worldwide, including in parts of Iran this week. Across Google, teams are working to make our tools broadly available, following the newly updated US sanctions applicabl, Google Public Policy on Twitter

SEO prioritization is super hard – there are always tons of things you could do, but days are short :). Could you see measurable positive effects, John Mueller on Twitter

You might not realize it, but Fred is a constant topic in German forums, John Mueller on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Feedback:

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Source: www.seroundtable.com