1. Google’s Collections feature now pushes people to save recipes & products, using AI
Google is giving an AI upgrade to its Collections. It will now make suggestions about items you can add to Collections based on your Search history across specific activities like cooking, shopping or hobbies. [Source: TechCrunch]
2. Google’s ads just look like search results
Google began rolling out a new look for its search results on desktop, which blurs the line between organic search results and the ads that sit above them. In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former. [Source: The Verge]
3. Instagram Is Adding a New Way to Find and Share Stories that Mention Your Profile
Instagram has added a new Stories @ mention option, which highlights any Stories that mention your profile, and enables you to easily re-share them into your own Stories stream. [Source: Social Media Today]
4. Google removes ‘ads’ and ‘sponsored’ labels from flight search results
Google says that it will “no longer charge partners for referral links on Google Flights.” As a result, the company is removing the “ads” and “sponsored” labels from Google Flights and the flights unit in Google search results. For many travel marketers that means stepping up Google My Business participation. [Source: Search Engine Land]
5. Google Dataset Search is out of beta and adds new features
Google Dataset Search enables searchers to find datasets stored across the web through keyword searches. “The tool surfaces information about datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the web, making these datasets universally accessible and useful,” Google explains. [Source: Search Engine Land]
6. Listings that earn featured snippets will not repeat on the first page of Google search
Pages that earn a featured snippet will no longer repeat as a regular listing on the first page of Google search. The corresponding regular listing may or may not appear as the first result on the second search results page. [Source: Search Engine Land]
7. Facebook & Instagram, stop showing Stories reruns
Facebook’s comes with new option to jam Stories in all its apps, it would charge much less repetitive and intrusive. It’s been over two years since Instagram Stories launched cross-posting to Stories. Countless hours of each feature’s 500 million daily users have been squandered viewing repeats. The only possible disadvantage to changing this could be fewer Stories ad perceptions. [Source: TechCrunch]
8. Google will drop support for data-vocabulary.org structured data on April 6
Data-vocabulary.org structured data markup will be ineligible for Google rich result features starting on April 6, 2020, the company announced. Site owners will need to convert to the schema.org markup if they want their pages to be eligible for Google rich results. [Source: Search Engine Land]
9. Instagram Drops IGTV Button Due to Lack of Use
Instagram is dropping the IGTV app from its home screen, saying very few users have been clicking on it. Users are primarily accessing IGTV content through links from the main feed, as well as the Explore feed and directly from creators’ profiles. IGTV videos can still be accessed this way going forward. [Source: Search Engine Journal]
10. Google’s mobile-first indexing guide update emphasizes the same content across site versions
Google has updated its mobile-first indexing developers guide. New guidelines were added in a number of areas, including crawling, structured data, visual content, and best practices. The site owners won’t be in control of which version of their site gets crawled and indexed hence they will have to make the pages more competitive within the search results. [Source: Search Engine Land]
