Daily Search Forum Recap: January 17, 2024 -

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.

A German study looks to see if Google Search (and Bing and DuckDuckGo) is getting better or worse. Google Ads lays off more ad reps as advertisers and agencies grow more frustrated by lack of human support. Google spoke about text within images for SEO. Google Search is not showing news boxes for some election queries. Bing is testing a shadow affect for snippets.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Is Google Search Is Getting Worse? German Study Published Says Kinda

A study released by the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany asked if Google Search is getting worse. The 16 page paper, downloadable as a PDF over here says that Google has slightly improved in some areas but there is still a lot of spammy content within Google Search.

Advertisers & Agencies Frustrated With Lack Of Google Ads Support

Advertisers and agencies seem beyond frustrated by the lack of support from the Google Ads support team. Nicola Agius covered it incredibly well, she said, “Google Ads customer service has plummeted to an unacceptable all-time low, according to search marketers.”

Google On Text Within Images

A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what is the SEO impact and would the text rank in the search results?

Google Search Not Showing News Boxes For Some Election Queries

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections] and others don’t seem to trigger news boxes.

Bing Tests Shadow Effect On Mouse Over Search Result Snippets

Microsoft is testing a new style for when someone hovers their mouse cursor over a search result snippet in the Bing Search results. Bing will add a shadow effect to that snippet on hover over.

Google Product Experts Swag

Here is a photo of some more Google product expert swag. I see some pens, and some sort of round metal container, maybe that had a t-shirt in it?