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808 'Google Search' stories May 2011 - March 2016

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Google Now might have intentionally shown this man a gesture of sympathy [Video]

Edoardo Maggio Mar 31 2016 - 2:34 pm PT

Google Now is a powerful tool. Combining the huge databases at the company’s disposal alongside the incredible amount of information it can pull – once granted access – from a customer’s usage of its many services, there are dozens of things that Google can help you with. Its power goes from answering to simple questions and completing easy requests to solving increasingly complex tasks that require a combination of the above to give more tailored and specific results.

In a somewhat curious outcome, Reddit user barney13 asked Google to show him some pictures from his trip to Nice, France, which while promptly showing the user correct results about his question also pulled out a snippet from an email which seemed oddly and yet particularly related to the request…

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Google is giving another ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages

Stephen Hall Mar 16 2016 - 9:04 am PT

Google announced in April of last year that it tweaked search results to give a ranking boost to sites that offer mobile-friendly versions, and now the Mountain View company is prepping to give even more ranking weight to these sites. The company is planning a change that “increases the effect of the ranking signal” for mobile searches to put even more mobile pages on the top…

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Destinations lets you plan your next vacation right from Google Search

Cam Bunton Mar 9 2016 - 1:57 am PT

Google Search just got a whole lot more useful for those of us who like to travel. With the new ‘Destinations’ feature you can search locations for your next trip, fine tune the search with your budget requirements and explore cities. In fact, you can virtually plan the entire trip right from within the Search user interface.

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Latest Google app beta adds OCR image recognition to Now on Tap

Abner Li Mar 8 2016 - 9:03 am PT

For all the features the Google app has added, it still does not have any image recognition capabilities. Google Goggles from 2010 could recognize book covers, landmarks, and even solve Sudoku, but was ultimately discontinued due to a lack of use. However, Now on Tap has gained some of those features in a recent update.

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Google helps fight Zika virus with expanded search results and forecasting tool

Abner Li Mar 3 2016 - 9:05 am PT

Since last year, the Zika virus has ravaged through South America and there are now cases of it popping up around the world. Google is aiding the fight against the outbreak by expanding search results and creating a new mapping tool. Additionally, the company has pledged $1 million to UNICEF.

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AMP sites are now live in Google Search results, denoted by green thunderbolt

Abner Li Feb 23 2016 - 12:26 pm PT

Update: AMP is officially live on mobile. It will be coming soon to the Android and iOS Google apps.

Ahead of tomorrow’s wider launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google Search is now denoting AMP articles in search results on mobile.

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Google patent reveals concept for real-time voting, right on the search homepage

Cam Bunton Feb 18 2016 - 4:58 am PT

A new patent has recently been granted to Google which conceptualizes real-time, online voting. The example used in its graphic portrays a made-up reality TV show called ‘Top American Singer’, and shows how you would only need to click on a contestant’s image to vote. No calling or texting a premium rate number required.

In the patent, it’s clear Google is imagining this would be used for things like reality shows where contestants get voted off. It would be ideal for shows like American Idol, although there is potential here that it could be used for more consequential events like a political leadership campaign.

As you’d expect from any Google Search based interface, the web page would also show news and content related to the campaign.

While it may not launch the concept as an official product, Google has long been experimenting with real-time election tracking. During the recent US political campaigns, Google’s search tool has been updating with poll results during debates.

In an age where everything appears to be heading towards being internet-based, it’s hard to imagine a future without online voting for the next state senator, US President or UK Prime Minister. Whether or not it’ll be as open and insecure as a simple Google vote is debatable. That would of course need to be a highly encrypted bespoke application, rather than a Google Search interface. But, for TV shows, the Google solution seems promising.

Google to comply more strictly with EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ act

Edoardo Maggio Feb 11 2016 - 4:01 am PT

Following a series of pressures by European regulation and privacy authorities, Google will soon start removing unwanted results from all of its domains. Despite having complied with the EU’s rules regarding the so-called ‘right to be forgotten‘ act, the search giant has so far only removed the results within the specific country’s domain.

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Longtime Search SVP Amit Singhal leaving Google after 15 years, head of AI taking over

Abner Li Feb 3 2016 - 9:41 am PT

Google’s longtime Senior Vice President of Search Amit Singhal is leaving the company after 15 years. In a Google+ post, he said that February 26th would be the last day and that he would be looking into philanthropy in the future. Re/Code is reporting that the Search will be merged with the company’s other artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts.

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Google Search now features informational yoga cards

Abner Li Jan 12 2016 - 8:47 am PT

As part of Google’s continuing efforts to make Search more useful, it now has cards for yoga poses. Announced by Google Hong Kong’s Plus account, the feature is now fully rolled out on mobile and desktop search.

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Google Search bar A/B testing ‘What’s Hot’ and ‘Nearby’ shortcuts

Abner Li Jan 11 2016 - 7:45 pm PT

Google is known for frequently A/B testing new features to small subsets of users. Some are now reporting seeing shortcuts for ‘Recent Searches’, ‘What’s Hot’, and ‘Nearby’ when tapping on the Google Search bar from the homescreen.

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Google search data shows what people in each state searched for most in 2015

Abner Li Dec 28 2015 - 10:28 am PT

The Google searches people make can reveal a great deal about their interests and concerns. When that data is aggregated, it can reveal general trends in society. For a long time, Google used such trend data to monitor for flu outbreaks for instance. Estately, a real estate blog, mined Google Trends to reveal what terms people in each state search for the most this year.
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WSJ: Google is working on an AI-powered chat service that may or may not be a new Hangouts

Abner Li Dec 22 2015 - 1:57 pm PT

Hangouts is widely criticized in the Android community for being slow and buggy. According to a rumor last week, SMS support is being stripped out of Hangouts in order to make the app a better chatting service. Perhaps on a related note, The Wall Street Journal is today reporting that Google has grander ambitions for the chat field and plans to infuse their artificial intelligence technology into it.

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Google Search will begin indexing sites with HTTPS over HTTP

Abner Li Dec 17 2015 - 9:12 am PT

Google is a security conscious company and by default all their sites are served over a more secure HTTPS connection that prevents nefarious people from looking at your traffic. Today, they have announced that they will begin to prioritize HTTPS websites when crawling them.

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Google’s ‘Year in Search 2015’ reveals this year’s most searched for events, objects and people

Abner Li Dec 16 2015 - 1:51 am PT

Google has released its annual ‘Year In Search’ video and website that highlights what people searched for most in 2015. As the year comes to a close, other Google properties like YouTube have done the same, as well as many other tech companies.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7o7R5BgWDY]

The Year in Search video is more US-centric, but has global events intertwined. The Google Trends page allows users to view the top topics searched for in 12 countries as well as more general global one. It reveals what was popular on a month by month basis and how many searches each topic received this year.

Google has also released its Top Lists from 2015 that shows the top 10 things searched for in various trending categories, like people, movies, athletes. Globally, the top search term was Lamar Odom, who is also the number one searched for person. He is followed by Charlie Hebdo (top searched global news item) and massive multiplayer game Agar.io. The full list for the top searches of 2015:

Lamar Odom
Charlie Hebdo
Agar.io
Jurassic World
Paris
Furious 7
Fallout 4
Ronda Rousey
Caitlyn Jenner
American Sniper

For global consumer tech, the iPhone 6S was the most searched for gadget, followed by the Galaxy S6 and Apple Watch, the only wearable to make the list. The full list is as follows:

iPhone 6s
Samsung Galaxy S6
Apple Watch
iPad Pro
LG G4
Samsung Galaxy Note 5
Samsung Galaxy J5
HTC One M9
Nexus 6P
Surface Pro 4

Now on Tap recognizes flight numbers, package tracking, news articles, and more languages in first major update

Abner Li Dec 15 2015 - 8:57 am PT

Now on Tap has been criticized for its lack of usefulness since its launch in October. Today, it’s receiving its first major update that adds new languages and now recognizes more types of information. The screenshot feature previous seen in the beta channel is also now rolling out again.

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Google Search results get Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa decorations in time for holidays

Cam Bunton Dec 14 2015 - 7:33 am PT

Google regularly celebrates holiday seasons by launching special little easter eggs, games and decorations across its services. This year, if it wasn’t for the Santa Tracker and Spin the Dreidel game, you’d think Google was under the impression it was Star Wars season. Turns out, that’s not the case.

Barry Schwartz spotted that Google has indeed decorated its search results in time for the holidays. Simply head to Google.com and search for ‘Christmas’, ‘Chanukah’ or ‘Kwanzaa’ and you’ll see the following imagery along with the relevant search results. All three holidays are celebrated with traditional imagery like the Menorah, Christmas Tree and the aforementioned Dreidel. (As a side note: Searching for ‘Dreidel’ or ‘Menorah’ also brings up the Chanukah decorations in Search).

While the holidays get a brief hat-tip, Star Wars has undoubtedly been the biggest focus for Google’s design team this year. With its movie franchise tie-in, Google themed virtually all of its services and launched some Star Wars editions of the Cardboard VR sets, while Motorola and Verizon teamed up to launch Star Wars DROID Turbo 2 handsets.

Accelerated Mobile Pages Project gains more partners, late February 2016 launch

Abner Li Dec 10 2015 - 2:29 pm PT

The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is gaining more traction as more than just publications are announcing their support to the open source project to speed up and improve mobile web pages. Many, including Google, are beginning to announce when users should begin to see AMP pages in day-to-day use.

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Google Search now has a Pinterest-like image saving feature

Abner Li Nov 30 2015 - 7:46 pm PT

Google today has added the ability to save and organize the photos you find through Image search. The Pinterest-like feature currently only works on a mobile browser, but will be welcomed by those who often browse via Google Image search.

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Whoops! Google claims ‘bug’ was pushing down competitor search results from Yelp and TripAdvisor

Cam Bunton Nov 25 2015 - 2:50 am PT

Over the weekend, executives from Yelp and TripAdvisor noticed that Google was pushing restaurant, or POI results from its services down in favor of its own. Neither of the popular location information services was particularly pleased to see it happening, but Google claims it was due to a “bug” and that it will be fixed…just as soon as possible!

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Google Search can now answer a variety of much more complex questions

Abner Li Nov 16 2015 - 12:03 pm PT

Recent updates to Google Search allow it to better understand complex queries and provide more accurate answers, meaning users can now Google questions involving superlatives, order, complex combinations, and get answers from a specific time period. This update comes thanks to Google being better able to understand the intent and different pieces of a question.

“We can now break down a query to understand the semantics of each piece,” Google says.

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Yahoo will now show Google search results after signing deal

Cam Bunton Oct 26 2015 - 2:23 am PT

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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Former Google employee was able to buy the google.com domain … for one minute

Ben Lovejoy Oct 1 2015 - 5:11 am PT

There have been other cases of huge companies forgetting to renew their domains, and inadvertantly making them available to others to purchase, but one domain you might have thought would be well-protected from such mistakes is google.com. Not so, it appears: a former Google employee noticed that the domain was available for purchase via Google’s own domain name service – and successfully bought it.

Sanmay Ved, former ad sales lead for the company in Australia and NZ, said that he was just exploring the Google Domains interface and entered google.com to see what domains it would suggest.

To my surprise, Google.com was showing as available! I clicked the add to cart icon beside the domain (which should not appear if the domain is not available for sale). The domain actually got added to my cart as seen by the green check-box, and the domain appeared in my cart.

The transaction successfully completed and he started receiving emails intended for Google’s webmaster.

The company didn’t take long to notice, however: Ved reports that Google cancelled the transaction one minute later, something it was able to do immediately only because the domain had been bought using Google’s own service. If he had bought it elsewhere, getting it back again would have taken rather longer.

Oh, and the cost of owning one of the world’s most valuable domains? $12. Refunded when Google took it back. Would have been totally worth it for the bragging rights (“Oh yeah, I used to own google.com”) even without the refund …

You can read the full story, complete with screengrabs, at Ved’s LinkedIn blog.

Via Business Insider

Google voice search just got a whole lot smarter thanks to new acoustic model

Cam Bunton Sep 25 2015 - 1:51 pm PT

Google’s voice recognition technology used in software and services like Google Now and search has been among the best for the past couple of years. Still, the company hasn’t been resting and just announced that the methods in which it detects and predicts words have been improved to give much faster, more efficient results with better reliability…

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