TikTok is going to start serving ads in its search results. Brands will be able to target users specifically using the app’s search box to look up products by using a new feature on the TikTok Ads Manager program called the Search Ads Toggle. The tool is not a standalone product, but an extension of…
Google will stop allowing publishers to add publications to the Google Publisher Center manually. Instead, Google will automatically add eligible publications pages later this year. This change will likely lead to even more confusion around Google News inclusion, which we have had for years since Google changed the inclusion process back in 2019. What Google…
Google is implementing jurisdiction-specific surcharges for ads served in certain countries, impacting advertisers globally. Why we care. These new fees, such as the Canada DST Fee, will increase advertising costs for businesses targeting audiences in affected jurisdictions, regardless of the advertiser’s location. By the numbers: 2.5% Canada DST Fee starting Oct. 1. Surcharges apply to…
As long as we apply data science to society, we should remember that our data may have flaws, biases, and absences. That is one motif of MIT Associate Professor Catherine D’Ignazio’s new book, “Counting Feminicide,” published this spring by the MIT Press. In it, D’Ignazio explores the world of Latin American activists who began…
Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, is believed to infect as much as one-third of the world’s population. Many of those people have no symptoms, but the parasite can remain dormant for years and later reawaken to cause disease in anyone who becomes immunocompromised. Why this single-celled parasite is so widespread, and what…
Computer programs called large language models provide software with novel options for analyzing and creating text. It is not uncommon for large language models to be trained using petabytes or more of text data, making them tens of terabytes in size. A model’s parameters are the components learned from previous training data and, in essence,…
Did you know that Google Search checks about four billion host names each and every day for robots.txt purposes? Gary Illyes said in the December Search Off The Record podcast “we have about four billion host names that we check every single day for robots.txt.” He said this at the 20:31 mark in the video….
Microsoft has released a patent named Web Content Reliability Classification that talks about how to develop a reliability score for a website or content on a website. The patent seems like it can be used by the Bing Search team for better ranking of websites and web content, but that does not mean it is currently being…
Since Google introduced Bard in February, everyone has been asking what that means for the Google Assistant. Well, today we know the answer – Bard is coming to Google Assistant. Assistant with Bard, as Google is calling it, is coming to iOS and Android in the “coming months.” What Google said. Google wrote, “Today we…
Google Search might be looking at the items in your menu within your Google Business Profile and how busy your establishment is during popular times as local ranking factors and signals. That’s according to a report by Claudia Tomina. Tomina documented tests on this and believes Google is using these signals to rank businesses in…