This morning at 1:48 am ET, Google confirmed a Google Search ranking bug impacting a large number of the Google Search results. Google wrote, “There’s an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that’s affecting a large number of search results. We’ve identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout.”

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google is still at it, maybe it is angry again about the possibility of it being broken up by the DOJ after being ruled a monopoly. But in all seriousness, the search ranking volatility is super heating, almost combusting. The chatter is still super heated and many of the tools are showing extreme volatility.

Google is testing showing AI Overviews for users not signed in to their Google account. Some users are seeing AI Overviews for searches when using Chrome in Incognito mode (i.e. private mode, not signed in).

Google Search changed how many stories it shows for political figures recently. Now Google shows the two by two top stories grid in search for searches on Harris, Trump and other political figures. Google use to show 7 top stories formats for these figures.

Google has confirmed it is testing more than 10 ads (some 18) in the Google Shopping ad box. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said “This is a small experiment exploring different configurations for shopping ads to promote greater discovery.”

Summer’s going by rather fast, but one event that’s already come and gone has been this year’s edition of Google’s PE Summit for the EMEA region. It took place on June 20th and 21st in Zürich, Switzerland, and was hosted at Google’s own offices as well as in a virtual format, similar to previous years.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. The US is considering breaking up Google as a remedy to it being a monopoly…

We keep trying to understand if Google Search will change, if it will just be AI Overviews or if the change will be more drastic. Well, Google demoed Gemini Research, where Google uses AI to do your research, by curating information across the web to build a document that gives you a detailed researched answer.

When Google announced the new Google Search Console recommendations, one of the examples of the recommendations was to bulk export your data because “Search Console only shows 35% of your performance data.” Now, this is not new, we knew Google anonymized way too much of your data in Search Console, but now Google is showing how much in this example report.

I am hearing reports of some spammers or hackers hijacking some Google Hotel listings by marking some hotels as permanently closed and also changing the phone numbers to WhatsApp numbers. This can be a huge concern for many hotel operators, but I am not sure how widespread the issue is.

US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google, out of Bloomberg last night was the big business news from yesterday. How would Google be broken up? Well, they would diversify Android and Chrome and potentially try to force Google to sell “AdWords,” they mean Google Ads.

Apple Business Connect has added a new feature named Showcase enhancements. A “Showcase” allows you to share up-to-date information with your customers, like seasonal items or promotions. Apple extended these showcases for longer periods and more characters.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

We’ve all been complaining about the lack of citations and links in the new Google AI Overviews. Recently Google began testing icons for link citations in the AI Overviews and has been testing them on and off. Here is one of those with tons of link icons, like about 20 of them, for one AI Overview.

Google can show the connections a person or entity have in its knowledge panel and break down those connections by category. In the example below, for Elon Musk, Google is showing the family connections, the work with connections and the people also search for connections.

A Google document that came out of the DOJ trails said that back in 2017, Bing Search was faster than Google was specifically looking at mobile queries. The document was an internal Google document and went through 10 elements of latency.