This day in search marketing history: January 14

R.I.P. AMP

In 2022, we revealed what happened when Search Engine Land shut off AMP.

TL;DR: “We have seen very little disruption to our traffic and have reaped the benefit of having a clearer picture of our audience analytics.”

We didn’t see any year-over-year declines in traffic that we could tie to AMP aside from the loss of pageviews to a handful of pieces that routinely spike for organic traffic.

Why did Search Engine Land shut off AMP? As we explained in We’re turning off AMP pages at Search Engine Land, it was due to competition in Top Stories (after AMP was no longer required for inclusion in Top Stories) and waning support by social media platforms.

Read all about it in What happened when we turned off AMP.

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Also on this day

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Shopify chat bug leads to titles with (1) in Google’s search results

2022: It was a widespread issue, not a Google bug, related to a chat feature in Shopify that had this unintended consequence in search.

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Google Ads enables bid simulator for Target ROAS, budget simulator for Maximize clicks, conversions

2020: You could see the projected impact of making bid or budget changes in your campaigns that used these smart bidding strategies.

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Google buys Pointy to bring SMB store inventory online

2020: Pointy had solved a problem that vexed startups for more than a decade: how to bring small, independent retailer inventory online.

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Nofollow couldn’t save the Google webmaster blog from comment spam

2019: Google removed the ability to leave comments on Google Webmaster blog because “most of the time they were off-topic or even outright spammy.”

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How Google’s Search Chief Has Been Living The “Mobile First” Life For Over A Year

2016: Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of search, did almost all of his searches for more than a year on mobile devices.

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Bing Ads Updates Keyword Planner With Impression Share Comparisons And More

2016: The new features: more competitive insights and benchmarking, customizable ad group and keyword bids, a new source for keyword suggestions and time range customization up to 24 months for keyword search volume.

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Bing Updates Its Logo With Uppercase “B” & New Teal Blue Color

2016: “It felt like the right time to freshen things up,” said Microsoft spokesperson.

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Google Street View Goes “Miniatur” To Capture Hamburg Model Train Exhibit

2016: Google documented the attraction with tiny Street View cars as though it were a real place.

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Google News Now Will Crawl & Index Images Hosted Off Your Domain Name

2015: In the past, if your images were hosted off your website’s domain, it was very unlikely Google would crawl them for Google News.

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Q4 Paid Search Ad Revenue Up 24 Percent YoY In The Americas [Kenshoo]

2015: Return on investment rose as revenue outpaced the rise in spending.

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Google History Added A Section For Your Google Now Cards

2015: You could track, over time, what Google Now Cards Google showed you each day.

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Google Translate App Gets Improved Picture & Conversational Translation

2015: The update brought both camera and conversation mode translation to the iOS app for the first time, as well as vast improvements to those features on the Android version of the app.

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Google Opens A Visitor Center

2015: Historically, Google had never allowed for random people to come and visit or tour the offices.

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Thousands Of Hotel Listings Were Hijacked In Google+ Local

2014: Thousands of hotels listed within Google+ Local appeared to have had links leading to their official sites “hijacked” and replaced with ones leading to third-party booking services.

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Google Image Search Adds Usage Rights To Search Tools

2014: The feature wasn’t new. You just no longer had to dig into the “advanced image search” features to get them.

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Two Videos Of What It Would Be Like If Google Was A Real Living Person

2014: Two video parodies make fun of what a Google would be if it was a real guy.

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Yelp Turns Up The Heat: 285 Consumer Alerts Issued Over Fake Reviews

2014: A pop-up alert appeared on a Yelp business profile page and warned consumers that a Yelp sting operation had caught the company trying to acquire reviews by buying them, offering gifts or discounts, or some other way that Yelp doesn’t allow.

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Wayback Machine Now Has 240 Billion URLs

2013: Prior to this update, The Wayback Machine provided access to about 150 billion URLs.

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Welcome AJ Kohn & Ginny Marvin To Search Engine Land, Marketing Land

2013: Kohn joined us as our Special Projects Correspondent. Marvin joined as a Contributing Writer, focusing primarily on paid advertising topics (she would go on to become Editor-in-Chief from October 2018 to December 2020).

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DuckDuckGo Relaunches With New Visual Design

2012: Founder Gabriel Weinberg has been taking feedback and tweaking the design for at least three-plus weeks in the site’s community forum, where he announced the new look and layout.

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Google’s John Hanke Speaks About New Mobile Incubator

2011: After six years at the helm of Google Maps, Hanke said he was “restless” and was a bit tired of running a large organization.

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Google, Bing Up While AOL Hits All-Time Low: comScore December Search Data

2011: Google hit 66.6% – a record high for Google in comScore’s numbers – while AOL hit a historic low of 1.9%.

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More See Horizontal Look For Top Three Google Ads

2011: In the new format, the headline was combined with the first description line, or the two description lines were combined.

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South Korean Police File Criminal Charges Over Google’s WiFi Data Gathering

2011: Police examined the data that Google collected between October 2009 and May 2010 and determined that it broke two South Korean laws.

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Bing Set To Advertise During Golden Globe Awards

2011: Both ads played on the Bing “decision engine” idea by having aspiring actors explain why they decided to get into acting, followed by a message that “pre-congratulates the Golden Globe winners of tomorrow.”

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Yahoo’s Irving: “Hell Yes” Yahoo Is Committed To Flickr

2011: “Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.”

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Google Search Suggestions For Mobile Get Locally Relevant

2010: Query suggestions varied based on user location.

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Experian Hitwise: Google Passes 72% U.S. Market Share

2010: Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com all saw their search share drop from November to December.

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100 Day Reminder: AdWords API v13 Sunsetting

2010: Another warning.

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Google Integrates “Real-Time” Messages Into Place Pages, Makes BlackBerry Mobile App More Useful

2010: Businesses could use their Place Pages to promote time-sensitive (real-time) events – as long as they could find the feature.

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Shashi Seth Now At Yahoo From AOL, Cooliris & Google

2010: As the new Senior Vice President of the Yahoo Search Products team, Seth would manage Yahoo’s Search team and all things related to Yahoo Search.

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Chinese Gov’t Offers Bland Statement On Google, Google.cn Employees Given Indefinite Holiday

2010: China’s government suggested it likely wasn’t going to allow Google to operate unfiltered or negotiate with the search engine.

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Yahoo Adds Network Distribution & Improved Importing To Search Ads

2010: Network Distribution allowed advertisers to select if they wanted to advertise on Yahoo’s entire network or just on either the Yahoo Search network or Yahoo Search Partner network.

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Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?

2010: The massive number of new tweets coming in was to blame. The search index behind Twitter Search couldn’t hold it all.

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After The Hack, Should I Still Trust Google & The Cloud With My Data?

2010: Would the entire GoogleHack episode develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing? (Spoiler alert: No.)

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Google Pledges $1 Million To Haiti Relief Efforts, Bing & Yahoo Add Donation Info

2010: The major search engines responded by linking information about disaster relief efforts from their homepages.

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Google Local Business Ads Score New Features

2009: New links appeared at the bottom of the ad’s info window: Get Directions, Street View, and/or Save to My Maps.

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Google Creates Smart Sitemap Generator Tool

2009: It used web traffic, log files and other methods to find new or modified URLs. 

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Google Ends Google Video Uploads, Shutters Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball & Jaiku

2009: Google ceased developing a variety of products as part of a continuing move to keep efforts focused on products with greater usage

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Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

2009: The program was aimed at developers, hosting companies and others to take on the responsibility of billing, support and training, in exchange for a 20% discount on the services.

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Adobe & Yahoo Discontinue PDF Contextual Ad Program

2009: Blame the failure on the economic conditions.

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Consumer Groups Trying To Preempt Behavioral Targeting For Mobile Ads

2009: A complaint sought to preempt the development of behavioral targeting and profiling in mobile advertising.

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Harvard Prof: Deceptive Ads ‘Widespread’ On Yahoo’s Right Media

2009: The ads were either are false or failed to make legally required disclosures.

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Yahoo Shuts Down Content Match In UK

2009: Yahoo matched the advertiser’s ads by the contextual relevancy of the page’s content to the keywords the advertisers purchased.

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Google Cuts 100 Recruiters; May Replace Up To 70 Engineers Due To Office Closures

2009: Google implied the cuts would be due to the engineers not being willing or able to relocate to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

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An Apology To Wired & The Search Marketing Community

2008: The article generated some serious spam issues for Wired, generated discord within the search marketing community, and injured the search marketing industry in general.

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Google Loves The iPhone, But Google’s Eric Schmidt Won’t “Talk” About It

2008: Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board and was on stage for the iPhone’s introduction.

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Liberty Media Corporation Bought 14 Million Shares In IAC

2008: The 14 million shares came out to about $339.5 million, but gave Liberty Media Corporation about a 30 percent stake in the parent company of Ask.com.

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IncrediMail Gets Crushed Financially By Google AdSense Ban

2008: The ban seemed to have caused their stock price to drop 45% in one day.

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Professor Bans Google & Wikipedia In Class Room

2008: University of Brighton professor said using Google and Wikipedia doesn’t encourage students to use their “own brains” enough

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From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)

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Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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< January 13 | Search Marketing History | January 15 >

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