Webcology

Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Cons...

Jim and Kristine learn of the death of the father of SEO, Bruce Clay while discussing industry announcements. Bruce is thought to be the first person to make a professional service out of improving a website to achieve better search engine results. Bruce built an agency that spanned the world with offices serving every continent except Antarctica. A staple speaker, panelist, presenter, exhibitor,...

The SpaceX IPO is about to drop in what is expected to be the world's highest value initual public offering, one that will make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SoftBank might have shown a weakness in the AI sector when it was unable to use its 9.7% share in OpenAI as collateral against a 6Billion loan. Anthropic has released a public version of its mythical Mythos model but secur...

- The May 2026 Core Update has finished rolling out. This was a content heavy update. Tips on how to find the pages containing affected content, and what to do when you find them - Law enforcement in Philadelphia are using social media to track individuals posting anti-AI memes or messages to their profiles. - Microsoft wants to make its newly announced AI personal assistant, Scout, addictive befo...

(This episode was recorded late due to illness) - Google's May 2026 Core Update continues to roll out.  - Google has changed it's home page to promote AI features from Google I/O.  - Google Business Profiles is now offering detailed rejection notices. Previously GBP owners were left in the dark to figure out the issues on their own.  - The links report in Google Search Console is broken. I...

Google announced sweeping changes to the way it displays search results at Google 1/0 2026. Going forward, Google will be presenting expanded AI generated overviews with traditional links pushed far below the fold. Most of the episode looks at Google's changes, including their moves towards facilitating agentic search. Google wants to be the "do it for you" machine. We also talk about...

We keep having these very long shows covering dozens of different stories because the worlds we work in are changing so rapidly and with such frequency. This is another long episode touching on over three dozen items. Here's a brief but incomplete rundown: - Google Discover data missing in GSC for May 7 - 8. If you don't see it or it looks kinda weird, it's them not you. - Google Ads i...

It was a busier than normal news week. Here's what we covered: - Ask Jeeves is officially dead. IAC formally killed the OG search engine earlier this week.  - There's been a spike in Google Business profile suspensions.  - GSC fixed the 50 week impression data logging issue.  - A Hard Drive shortage is slowing AI development and pushing up the costs of new computers and equipment. - Presen...

Chrome released a massive security update fixing over 30 vulnerabilities. Be sure you're running v147.0.7727.137/138 and accept no substitutes. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman's identity verification service promoted a partnership with the wrong Mars in an embarrassing mix-up of identities. The Pentagon is signing deals with virtually any AI, chip, storage, or techbro firm it can incl...

Anthropic's Mythos is too dangerous for the open market but too useful to be ignored. Though only released to a relatively small number of large-scale developers in order for them to develop defenses to Mythos, the hyper-powerful agentic-organizer appears to have itself been hacked. A blog post from the Mozilla Foundation noted Mythos helped their developers find and close 277 security vulnera...

Wikipedia erased an entry about legendary search journalist Barry Schwartz citing their editorial team's perception Barry has a commercial interest in a Wikipedia entry. That he's spent most of this century writing a daily compendium of search engine related news stories every day since 2003 didn't appear to change their opinion. Including his work with Search Engine Watch and Search E...

The war with Iran is nearly a month old and the effects are being felt across the greater economy. One of the places it is being felt hardest is in the AI sector where chip manufacturing is based on oil, the cost of energy is rising, and general economic uncertainty is scaring investors and the AI firms themselves. Aside from the war, the biggest story this week was the leak of all that Claude cod...

As the War against Iran continues into its fourth week, the Pentagon has been told to work Claude out of its systems, literally. The Secretary of War designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk at the beginning of March and wants it gone now. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO by the end of 2026 while telling employees ChatGPT is a productivity tool and users it is also a sexy chatbot. Either way, OpenAI...

A couple of GSC bugs to report of the top with BigQuery exports not working and an issue with the date selector in crawl stats. In both cases, it's a them thing, not a you thing. If you're running ads through Goolge Ads in the EU you need to confirm if the campaign has political content by the annual deadline of March 31. You can do this via the "campaign settings" link.  AI is hav...

And, suddenly last Saturday, we were at war with Iran. That will have profound effects on our economy and the tech industry. If the war is a component in a tech story, or tech is a big part of a war story, we will report and talk about it as such. If not, we'll try to leave most of the war reporting and commentary to political pundits and journalists.  The February 2026 Google Core Update whic...

The adoption rate of Agentic AIs appears staggering. Making, deploying, and managing AI driven agents is easier than ever. This, of course, introduces a myriad of security concerns, many of which will become apparent faster than we think. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about security and privacy concerns with Clawdbot and Copilot. Google's AI Mode is operable in 53 new language...

The situation remains normalizing, all facshed up. At least some of the folks working at Palantir are starting to understand what their work is doing to their world. According to reports in Wired Magazine and 404Media, employees of the meta-surveillance giant are not told how their products are extensively used by ICE to target and round-up real people. Listeners will be relieved to know that the...

There is no sugar coating how brutal the last week has been. ICE agents murdered yet another regular person in the American federal government's relentless and brutal crackdown on Minneapolis Minnesota. This week's extra-judicial killing was broadcast live to the Internet by dozens of bystanders with mobile phones as was the previous one, just a week before. The mental and emotional burden...

Elon Musk's AI-Grok continues to churn out non-consensual images of people including sexualized images of children, an issue that continues into this week. Google is integrating core search signals into its AI Experience in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This, along with Personal Intelligence, the ring that binds all your Google apps that's coming to Gemini and AI Mode soon, will work to "s...

It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good. These events mark a transit point that suggests the American government will continue its jo...

Five high profile OG Search Engine Optimization experts talk about the year that was and the year that may well be in our annual Year End Revue. Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at Yoast, Ryan Jones - Senior Vice President of SEO at Razorfish and the creator of SERPrecon.com, and  Topher Kohen - Legendary Large Scale Publisher SEO, formerly of CBSNews and CNN.com, join Jim Hedger and Kristine Schach...

The December 2025 Core Update continues to roll out, as one does pretty much every year around this time. Some are seeing results early but there hasn't been a major stir or fuss from the SEO community. That might be because it is somewhat harder to judge early outcomes of a core update based on page ranking or page traffic while these metrics are being effected by the transition to generative...

It's the middle of December and throughout the Web, all the crawlers are stirring and AI Bots getting fed. The products displayed on folk's sites with due care, in hopes that St. Googlishous would bring traffic there. Suddenly somewhere in GA4 there arose such a clatter, I had to get off of my ass to see what was the matter. And then what from Schwartz's deli of news briefs should appe...

It was a long week following a long Thanksgiving weekend that opened on CyberMonday with a login-outage at Spotify. Folks who logged out of their Spotify accounts on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday awoke to a virtual lockout which was finally cleared between 3 and 5pm. Google Search Console reports are lagging a couple days behind. This podcast was recorded on a Thursday and that data hadn't been...

Even Google's Gary Illyes is saying it, "the change is hard to accept" in regards to the evolution of AI in search but that SEM and SEO will coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years. That optimism is something to be thankful for, even if AI is likely to mess up thousands if not millions of Thanksgiving dinners as it mashes more than potatoes with pinches of this and tha...