search

A report by the UK’s telecoms and Internet watchdog Ofcom says that children are too trusting of what they find on the web, a surprisingly high percentage of them taking search results on trust, and unable to identify paid ads.

One in five online 12-15s (19%) believe information returned by a search engine such as Google or Bing must be true, yet only a third of 12-15s (31%) are able to identify paid-for adverts in these results.

The report found that the position was even worse with YouTube … 
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Google acquired app streaming startup Agawi earlier this year, and now it looks like the Mountain View company is putting their technology to good use. As of today, users will be able to stream certain apps straight from Google’s mobile search results. Google is also going to show “app-first” content (that without a web-based counterpart) in search results starting today as well…
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According to a report this morning from The Wall Street Journal, Google will now be able to show publicly available info from the Facebook app in mobile searches. Clicking on such a link while on your smartphone will take users directly to the relevant part of the Facebook app. The agreement between Google and Facebook went into affect last Friday, according to an Alphabet spokesperson.

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It’s no surprise that Google employs artificial intelligence to help parse search queries, but it did surprise me to learn that a full 15% of Google searches are ones its systems have never seen before. It’s these that the company has been decoding with the help of an AI system called RankBrain, reports Bloomberg.

For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.

As you’d expect, Google uses literally hundreds of different ‘signals’ to make sense of searches, and the vast majority of these are based on discoveries and insights that people in the team have had – but RankBrain is the first system that genuinely learns … 
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Yahoo announced in its financial earnings results for Q3 that it has signed a partnership deal with Google to show search results and ads in its own search tools. The deal came in to effect on October 1st and will last until the end of 2018. Under the terms of this new deal, Yahoo gets to choose which search queries it sends to Google, while Google provides search ads, algorithmic search and image search services for mobile and desktop…

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In addition to unveiling its all new logo today, Google has announced some changes coming to its Search experience on mobile devices and its Google Now homepage on Android. Google notes that it’s made the search results page for mobile devices easier to navigate with a new swipeable and tappable UI. Google offered a look at the new UI for images, videos and news stories in the video below.
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It looks like Google has been working behind the scenes to make searching for apps a much more intuitive and better-looking experience on Android. As spotted by the folks at Android Police, if you go searching for apps from the default search feature in Android, you’ll now get a very attractive, Material-themed grid of apps. Although it doesn’t work for every single term, simply search for anything followed by ‘apps’ and it’ll bring up a grid of downloadable options from the Google Play Store.

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Google puts a lot of effort into making the world’s knowledge organized and accessible, and in particular it has a record through its Crisis Response project of making certain information more accessible during times of disaster. Today it released a blog post detailing how it’s doing more to help people be prepared.

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Google teased some kind of #paywithaphoto Google Photos promotion last week, and now it looks like the food trucks are rolling out. The first locale luckily able to participate is New York City, and you can see the full schedule, running until August 2nd, below.
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Image via <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/buy-button-coming-to-google-search-2015-7" target="_blank">Business Insider</a>

Google confirmed at a conference in May that a “buy” button was planned for products in its search results, and today the company elaborated on those plans at a press event in NYC. The new feature called “Purchases on Google” will allow consumers to purchase products directly from ads in Google Search results. Featuring a buy button in ads when searching for products should make purchasing those products more seamless for consumers and boost the value of ads for merchants.
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The Google app — previously known as “Search” — was updated to version 4.8 last week, and now a new teardown has revealed some interesting new details about some features that might be coming in future versions. Most notably, it looks like offline support for “OK, Google” is likely to be on the way, letting you give your device some voice commands without having a connection to the Internet…
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Google is known for historically having a goal with search to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Search engines by design are intended to get you what you’re looking for on the first try, so it makes total sense that Google optimizes ruthlessly in hopes that you don’t have to click the next page link. But ever since the company introduced search cards it’s been evident that it wants to be the host of the information you’re looking for whenever possible. A new small change today adds on that.

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Update: What’s that? Oh, just the smell of change. After initially standing firm on its implementation of the hotwording module and proprietary Google extension being automatically downloaded in new installations of the Chromium open source browser, a wave of criticism has led to the team pulling it out of Chromium 45 and onwards. The module that manages whether the hotword listening extension is enabled will be “disabled by default” and the proprietary technology that actually listens for “Ok Google” will not download. A member of the team says simply:

In light of this issue, we have decided to remove the hotwording component entirely from Chromium. As it is not open source, it does not belong in the open source browser.

The original story continues below.

It all started with a blinking LED light. Ofer Zelig wrote on his blog today about an odd case where the LED light on his computer, that turns on whenever the microphone or camera is activated, seemed to blink every few seconds or so while he was working on his PC. He investigated in the Windows Task Manager to look for any process that might be to blame – no dice. He shut down some suspicious processes that might have been causing it and says he didn’t have any malware installed, but still to no avail. Turns out, the culprit was none other than Google’s Chrome browser…

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Google in an announcement today on its blog on public policy issues said that it will soon have a web form for victims of revenge porn to complete in order to have links to the offending images removed from global search results.

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Google controls most of the search engine market in Europe, and as a result receives most ‘right to be forgotten’ requests, those things where individuals can request the de-listing of links to sensitive information about themselves that are deemed out-dated or irrelevant. But more than half of requests are denied, and of those that are appealed, most of those are too denied – which the European Union says is just fine.

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If you’re anything like me, at some point during your day you’ll consciously think to yourself about what time you’d like to get up the next day. You’ll think about it, but then just forget to set an alarm on your phone before you go to sleep and end up waking at a different time than you’d like. Well, there’s a neat card in Google search that can be evoked with a simply query that may help you with this problem.

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