This week, it was awkwardly quiet with the Google rankings and then Google dropped the bombshell, the July 2022 Google Product Review update touched down. Google also released new search quality raters guidelines, a refresh from the one updated 9-months ago. Google’s Things To Know feature went missing on desktop search. Google no longer counts the core web vitals scores for pages not indexed. Microsoft Bing said the new Bingbot makes up 5% of all crawls now. Google said age verification requirements may prevent a site from showing in Google Discover. Google Merchant Center now allows login required and restricted purchase to show in free listings. Google now shows three Local Service Ads on mobile, up from two. Google Local Service ads are seeing a lot of fake reviews. Google is testing list view top stories that overtake the web results. Google Search displays the return period in the search result snippets. Google Maps is testing infinite scroll in the map listing results. Google product carousel is displaying “appears on these lists.” Also, Google hotel listings show a section for “featured in.” Google tests explore more search refinements. We posted tons of new Microsoft Bing features. Google Ads is automatically switching some conversion actions to data-driven attribution. Google Maps may remove selfies, and blurry and poor-quality images. Google Ads and Bing Ads revenues were both up but both slowed. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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