Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
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Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines Gains AI Overview & YMYL Definitions
On Thursday, September 11, 2025, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was on January 23, 2025, over seven months ago. This update gives minor clarification as it relates to rating YMYL content and adds a handful of additional examples for rating newer features like AI Overviews. Google also posted fixes for typos and other minor clarifications.
Google Lens Serving Outage Yesterday
Google Lens stopped working for all users for a short period of time yesterday morning (NY time). Google confirmed the issue at 9:46am ET on Thursday, December 12th and then within the hour, they mitigated the issue.
Google Web Search Service API Documentation Has Been Removed
A couple of weeks ago, Google seemed to accidentally publish its Web Search Service API documentation, then pulled it down last week. Google doesn’t offer a public Web Search Service API, so we really can’t access it, but I assume it does have some partners with access, like Apple.
