Google

San Mateo, November 26, 2019 – Two years after the EU fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) and ordered it to open up its Google Shopping service to greater outside competition, around half of the ads on the platform in the UK, Germany and France are now placed via external providers according to a new study by Searchmetrics. But doubts remain as to whether this will convince the EU’s competition regulator.

San Mateo, May 16, 2019 - Websites that rank higher on Google tend to load faster and provide a smoother user experience on mobile according to a new Searchmetrics study conducted using Google’s open-source website auditing tool, Google Lighthouse[1]. And higher ranking sites in general are more likely to use modern web technologies such as next-generation image formats and the newer, faster HTTP/2 web protocol.  

San Mateo, February 28, 2019 - Wikipedia retains its crown as the most visible website in Google search results globally based on its performance in organic search in ten countries, including the United States, UK, Germany and France. Second comes YouTube, which also saw the biggest absolute improvement in search performance over the whole of 2018 in all the countries analyzed.

Interesting misfire of EU's Article 11 (according to Google). Article 11 is a proposed EU Copyright directive that would prevent quite a bit of the caching of content and inclusion of content Google does with its News pages.

According to Google:

Last weekend, I submitted my last Google+ post. From here on out, I won't be actively monitoring the platform given the expected demise of Google+. This is what I posted:

This is likely my last Google+ post but I don't plan to delete my Google+ account until February 28, 2019

Unless something significant happens, I don't plan to post again on Google+. It doesn't seem logical to invest my time and effort to post something we all know will be deleted in a couple months. I may leave a comment here or there on G+ but that's about it.

After nearly eight years of being a Google+ user, the time to say goodbye to the social network is almost here. For those of you that never saw the value of Google+, I  don't expect you to fully understand what hardcore users (I'm one of them) will be missing when the platform is no more.

San Mateo, December 05, 2018 - Over a year on from the European Commission’s antitrust ruling which forced Google to open up its shopping service to outside competitors, new Searchmetrics research suggests a third of ads within Google Shopping boxes are coming from providers other than Google. But the majority of these (23% of all ads) seem to be from digital marketing agencies profiting from Google Shopping’s revamped auction model. Only around 9% are from the traditional comparison shopping sites (CSSs) that the EU’s ruling was originally intended to support.

San Mateo, October 17, 2018 - Brands’ organic search strategies on Google should now be tightly tailored to the niche they operate in, according to the latest research by Searchmetrics. That’s because Google’s use of technologies such as AI and machine-learning are helping it pin-point, more clearly than ever, the specific factors that satisfy search queries in different niches and contexts.