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Weekly Update - August 10, 2019: YouTube Studio, Webmaster Tools, Podcasts


This week Google is rolling out new tools to help you plan your next vacation. There are also cool updates for bloggers, webmasters, podcasters, YouTubers and much more.
  • YouTube Studio Beta is now the default, and direct links to the classic video manager, analytics or dashboard will redirect there. But not to worry, if you are missing features from “classic” Creator Studio, you can switch back - for now.
  • Twitch is making it easier to “go live”. Twitch Studio (now in beta), has guided setup of your live stream, customizable templates, built in chat and more. If you’re interested, sign up for the beta.
  • If you are a blogger, video creator or journalist in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria, check out Google’s Question Hub to find questions that people want answers for. You can browse by keyword or category, review unanswered questions, and expand on them when creating content. Once you create an article or video, you can submit it to Question Hub where you can review performance metrics. Learn more.
  • Google has updated their testing tools for webmasters to use the evergreen Chromium renderer. Up until now, Google has been using Chrome 41 (released in March 2015) to render pages in the testing tools, including Search Console's URL inspection tool, the Mobile-friendly test, Rich results test and AMP test. Now it will be regularly updated to use the latest stable version of Chromium to run Javascript and render pages. The “evergreen Googlebot” was announced at Google I/O in May, and now the testing tools let you view your web pages the same way the Googlebot (and current browsers) do.
  • Google Images on desktop makes it easier to find information  in an image search. Now when you click an image search result, it appears on a non-scrolling side panel, keeping it in view as you look through the other results. If the images is a product, you’ll see details like the brand, price and reviews. And there are now captions on the related images shown under the selected search result. Google says “For retailers and publishers, this updated interface also means people are more likely to visit a web page to get information to help them with a task, or to buy a product on your site.”
  • If you’re a podcaster (or podcast fan), you’ll be glad to hear individual podcast episodes will be findable in search. Clicking the episode will open it in the Google Podcasts web app. You just need to be sure to include the word “podcast” in your search query. Google is indexing podcasts with an RSS feed, and transcribing podcast content to make it searchable.
  • If you are travelling, Google Search and Maps has some helpful updates.
    • There’s a new “Reservations” tab in “Your Places” in the Google Maps app, where you will see details for your upcoming trips. This is sort-of a replacement for the now-deprecated Trips app.
    • You can also see your trip at google.com/travel (automatically if you’ve gotten confirmations in Gmail). There Google will help you find a hotel, restaurants and things to do.
    • You can use Augmented Reality to help navigate on foot with Live View (in beta). This is available to Android and iOS devices that support ARCore and ARKit starting this week.
  • If you have Location History enabled on your device, the updated version of Timeline lets you easily see all the places you visited in a country or city, or view the places you’ve been by category like restaurant or attraction.
  • Google Search will help you find the best price for your next flight
  • Say goodbye to Google “Follow Your World”. What’s that you ask? Launched in 2011, it’s a service to track the addition of new satellite images for specific points of interest. It never made it out of “beta”. If you’ve been using Follow Your World, you have until September 30 to download your data.
  • The vast majority of Chrome Extensions have almost no users. No really. A recent analysis of more than 188,000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store found that half have fewer than 16 installs, and 87% have fewer than 1000 installs. Despite Google’s enormous user base, there are only 13 extensions with over 10 million installs and a few more that have between 5 and 10 million installs, including Google Hangouts, Google Photos, LastPass and Amazon Assistant. Those top extensions give an idea of what people are using them for: shopping, ad-blocking, security, and communications. 
  • Reminder: I’ve created a playlist of the videos I suggest in my weekly roundup link list. You can click the save playlist linkto save the playlist to your own YouTube account. I plan to add the latest videos each week. If you like it, let me know!
Read on for more updates and tips for YouTubers, webmasters, Android Q gesturers and more.
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Image: Aerial river view photo by Pok Rie from Pexels (Free to use)

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