Google’s 20th birthday celebrations continue with a detailed look at the company’s original headquarters. Available on Google Maps in Street View, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and the first employees worked out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park.
Tomorrow, Google will officially celebrate its 20th anniversary. While it was officially incorporated on September 4, 1998, the company has long marked the occasion on September 27th with a Doodle. Ahead of that, Google is getting ready for the festivities, starting with a parody poem that pays homage to all the Easter Eggs in Google Search.
To mark its 20th anniversary, Google today announced a number of changes to advance its marquee product. Focusing on AI and more visual content, Google Search is adding Activity cards to surface past searches, while subtopics allow for dynamic organization of results. Today’s new features are powered by a Topic Layer for the Knowledge Graph.
For the past several months, Google has been experimenting with a redesign to the Google Feed. Following reports last week of a rebrand, Google today confirmed that it’s now called “Google Discover” and is coming to the mobile web, along with a slew of other new features.
Over the past several years, Google has introduced new features to provide important safety information during emergency events and natural disasters. Ahead of Hurricane Florence, Google has enabled an SOS Alert for those directly impacted by the Atlantic storm.
In recent weeks, the Google Material Theme has permeated through more and more of the company’s apps and services. With a big redesign expected for Chrome this month, Google Search would be the next biggest product to get a revamped look. New screenshots today show Google already testing the new design.
In addition to customizable backgrounds in Chrome’s New Tab page, Google is testing a row of related search queries. Topic-based and populated from your search history, the bar began appearing for some users over the weekend.
Internally, Google is known for fostering a very open work environment that places a great deal of trust on employees. That means Googlers can affect a great deal of change as evidenced by the company backing out of Project Maven. A new petition provides insight to the employee reaction against Dragonfly — a censored search engine for China — that many believe is contradictory to Google’s principles.
Knowledge Panels are a useful way to get quick facts and other answers without having to dive into a full page. Google Search is now introducing new result types that answer queries about comparisons, while also adding relevant subtopics to panels.
It’s honestly pretty hilarious what you can end up seeing people ask about celebrities on the internet. In fact, there are even entire web-shows dedicated to having celebrities answer the most popular questions on Google. Now, Google is giving celebs the opportunity to answer those questions with a new app.
Multiple publications have since confirmed that Google is planning to launch a Search app that would comply with China’s censorship laws. A new report today details that Google is also working on a news-aggregation app that would similarly self-censor content in a sign of grander ambitions for the country. Meanwhile, since details first came to light yesterday, Google employees have been fiercely arguing the issue.
Google Search features a number of built-in utilities, with some — like an internet speed test — more useful than others — random number generator. The latest is somewhere in the middle and guides you through a minute-long breathing exercise.
According to a report this morning from The Intercept, Google is planning to re-launch its search engine in China. Coming back into the world’s most populous country, however, comes with a serious condition: Google will comply with demands from Chinese officials to censor topics it deems undesirable.
With the Google News Initiative announced earlier this year, the company is working to support journalism with features throughout News, YouTube, and of course Search. A new feature today for the latter product will display data tables right at the top of result pages.
Following its debut about a year ago, Google is today announcing improvements to its local event feature for Search which also adds personalized recommendations.
Unbeknownst to most users, Google has long featured native “Save” functionality to bookmark links and images. First built into Image Search and later the Search app on Android, Google also maintained a Chrome extension to save pages. However, Google is set to kill that client next month, thus sending mixed signals on the future of the feature.
Early this year Google announced that it would be adjusting how it ranks sites on mobile search with a new focus on page speed. Today, the company has revealed that this new “Speed Update” is officially rolling out.
Following the initial launch of a redesigned Search Console earlier this year, Google’s tool for monitoring and optimizing site performance is gaining a new capability. Frequently requested, web administrators will now be able to see the Google Search status of specific links.
Featuring summaries and key facts, Knowledge Graph panels in Google Search are an important way for users to quickly find information at a glance. Google is now making it easier for featured people, events, and organizations to suggest edits to keep their cards up-to-date.
Google’s Material Theme is slowly creeping its way into every corner of the company’s products, and that continues in part today with Google testing its “Google Sans” font in Search on mobile.
Google is applying its penchant for organizing the world’s information and making it easily accessible to the highly stressful area of choosing a college. Updated Knowledge Graph cards will now appear when searching for a 4-year college in the U.S. and include detailed information like admissions, costs, majors, and more.
In important markets, like India, Google often hosts specialized events to announce country-specific features and initiatives. At the second annual Google for Brazil event, the company today announced Android Go, along with new features in Search and Maps.
Back in March, our APK Insight into the Google app spotted a “pinned” floating sports score feature in development. The feature was officially unveiled today as part of the company’s wide-ranging coverage of the 2018 World Cup kicking off later this month.
