It's a new year which, as with all new years, brings a chance for a renewal, a hope of a new beginning, and in this, the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century, that hope was dashed within 48 hours with the invasion, kidnapping, and regime change in Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good. These events mark a transit point that suggests the American government will continue its journey away from cooperation and trust and move even faster towards coercion and hate. Beyond what any of the events of the last week mean for Americans themselves, all of this creates an increasingly difficult trade environment for everyone, including Americans themselves.

Meanwhile... The December 2025 Core Upate ended on December 29. Publishers appear to have taken the hardest hits with large scale declines taking place in all venues such as Discover, News, Top Stories, and organic search. One publisher, Tailwind CSS has let go of 75% of its engineers after seeing a 40% drop in traffic from Google. Microsoft is looking for a senior project manager to combat spam on Bing and Copilot. This is an incredible opportunity for someone able to, a) actually tame web spam at Bing, and b) explain how Bing search works to a wider audience like a certain beloved SEO character from days long past once did. Lightning rarely strikes the same place twice but it is known to strike all the time. Why not in Redmond? Google is also hiring, looking for a AI Answers and Search Quality Engineer. Based out of Cambridge MA, the position sounds decidedly less sexy than then Bing position does but, given it's the Internet, most things sound less sexy than the Bing position does. Google is also hiring a Search Intelligence Chief of Staff. This is absolutely decidedly more sexy than the Bing position.

Far less sexy, and almost downright scare, are some of the stuff coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. We often cover the weirder inventions, this one combining AI with a holographic image under the name, Friend in a Bottle. Far scarier than that is the revelations Elon Musk's AI Grok is being used to create and widely distribute non-consensual nudes based on people's images and what the UK based Internet Watch Foundation is calling, "criminal imagery involving kids".

A study by digital marketing agency Eight Oh Two concluded that 37% of consumers are starting their searches with AI rather than Google. Google is personalizing AI Overviews and AI Mode Answers. Google's John Mueller talks about working with Gemini and other LLMs, and a lot more on the Nothing New Year's Back Again Episode of Webcology

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