SearchCap: Cutts resigns, DuckDuckGo surges & clickthrough rates

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Matt Cutts officially resigns from Google
Jan 19, 2017 by Barry Schwartz
Matt Cutts is the new director of engineering at the US Digital Service. He has been on leave with Google since 2014 and officially resigned at the end of 2016.
Study shows search terms with the very worst (and best) clickthrough rates
Jan 19, 2017 by Greg Finn
A new study uncovers a slew of search terms that aren’t earning their fair share of clicks in the search engine results pages.
True marketing automation is predicting a customer’s next move, not reacting to a moment
Jan 19, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot
It’s time to break away from trusting expert opinions on shopper behavior and start trusting the machines. By building a unified profile of your customers’ behavior across all channels, you can create truly personalized shopping experiences. In “Trusting the Machine: Data Science and the Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Shopper” from Emarsys, you’ll learn how to stop focusing […]
DuckDuckGo surpasses 10 billion searches, with 4 billion happening in 2016 alone
Jan 19, 2017 by Amy Gesenhues
The privacy search engine says it had its biggest day already this year with 14M searches on January 10th.
Relaunching your website? Don’t forget an SEO audit!
Jan 19, 2017 by Janet Driscoll Miller
Columnist Janet Driscoll Miller outlines the steps you should take pre-launch and post-launch to ensure a smooth transition to a new website.