Search Engine Journal
There has been some concern over whether or not link authority would be lost as a result of inbound links to HTTP pages no longer being counted. It turns out Google will count the collective signals from inbound links pointing to both the HTTP and HTTPS versions of a page automatically. Matt Southern explains.
BBC
Google will need to quiet its robot if it wants to work with the U.S. military. The BBC cites the U.S. army as saying that the "Legged Squad Support System," referring to "the big dog," -- is capable of carrying 400 lbs. of equipment over rugged terrain. The U.S. Marines now says its petrol-powered engine is too noisy for them to use in battle.
Wired
The page view, similar to the click-through, was once the key way that Web sites owners understood their audiences. It was the way news organizations figured out who read their stories — how many, how often, which, from where — and the way publishers were able to calculate the value of serving up ads on those sites to determine the price they would change advertisers. As long as search advertising exists on a search engine, clicks will continue to count. For publishers, page views and clicks are dying metrics. It's time the industry steps up to define new ones as advertising …
BBC
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, Wednesday advised British startups to market their products on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter if they want to grow their businesses. He also added Google into the mix of media they should use, suggesting in an interview with Rohan Silva from the BBC Radio 4 that startups need a balanced strategy.
Engadget
"Morning News," a Chinese live program, introduced Xiaoice as a trainee anchor last Tuesday, where it took charge of the daily weather report. Microsoft's artificial intelligence took over. The company says it calls on smart cloud technologies and Big Data to learn about and interpret weather readings and then deliver reports. The AI is human-like, scoring 4.32 out of 5 in linguistic naturalness tests, per Microsoft. For comparison, humans have an average score of 4.76.
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal spotlights a woman that Google is counting on to catch up to Amazon in the cloud computing space. “Google … is turning to Diane Greene, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built VMware Inc.
into a corporate-computing powerhouse,” it writes. “Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai is giving Ms. Greene unusual authority over the company’s cloud efforts, including oversight of engineering, sales, support and marketing.”
Google
For geeky marketers, Google takes a deep dive to detail the latest edition of the Launchpad in the latest video in the developer video series. The episode features an introduction to the new API, an interview with a Google Drive engineer about the API design and a code walk-through of real source code that marketers can use today. The video details the command-line script that performs Google Drive file uploads and downloads.
Bing
The Carolina Panthers' perfect season ends with a loss of 20 to 13 to the Falcons, also ending a winning streak for Bing Predicts. Bing had predicted Caroline to get one step closer to an unbeaten season. There's still time for Denver to get back to winning against Cincinnati, per Bing Predicts, in Monday night's game.
Moz
Rand Fishkin explains why it's important to keep brand recognition at the forefront of a campaign strategy, and presents ideas to build a framework on how to get started on giving searchers a reason to prefer the brand.
Search Engine Journal
Dusty Vegas guides marketers through several strategies to help them find the one that will improve the performance of their paid search campaigns, taking several factors into consideration. He presents the benefits of the most popular paid search bidding strategies, and details those that tend to work better for most.