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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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…
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’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…
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.
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.
Have you ever wondered what the most commonly searched terms which lead to your site appearing in Google’s results are? Or maybe the top queries on mobile that lead to your site appearing in results? Well, Google has offered a Search Analytics Report in the Google Search Console for some time which provides this exact kind of data (where have you been?), and now it has created an API developers can use to play around with this data in their own apps.
It’s called the Search Analytics API and with it, developers get access to all the data on traffic that has come to them through search, and can sort it by parameters like country to gain insights into, for example, what are the top queries in India that lead to visitors.
The potential here is for developers to create graphical user interfaces to this data, so less tech savvy individuals would gain the ability to sift through their search data without needing prior knowledge on how to use an API.
Google’s Knowledge Graph attempts to surface relevant, actionable information to the search page so you don’t have to do as much clicking. As one example, Google presents population and other census data front and center when you search for a city. It looks like this card in particular, the one for cities and towns, has been updated with a new actionable snippet for flights…
Search for a product on Google and you might see a Knowledge Graph card to the right of the result links containing details on the product as well as links to sites selling it and the full Google Shopping reviews page. You may now also see snippets of what people are saying regarding certain aspects of a product.
First spotted by Search Engine Land, Google seems to be pulling quotes from the product reviews that it aggregates from other websites and placing them inside Search product cards. The company gets most of these reviews from the product pages of websites selling the item – Rakuten.com Shopping and B&H Photo are two places the reviews for the above speakers come from, for example.
As Search Engine Land notes, you can click through to see all the reviews for a product, but on the full reviews page the only link provided against each review simply goes to the product page hosting the review – it doesn’t take you to that exact review on the host site.
Google is constantly adjusting its Knowledge Graph cards, most recently removing Google+ posts from the cards for popular businesses.
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.
As reported by users on Twitter, Google has updated its cached link toolbar with new ways to view website snapshots. Cached webpages can now be viewed in their full glory with all styling intact, in a text-only version that strips all styling, or viewed by their source, meaning you can view the code behind the cached webpage.
Here’s what visiting the text-only cached version of Google.com looks like:
The company every so often will take a snapshot of a website and save it to its cache, so the page can still be viewable in the event that the website its hosted on becomes inaccessible. You can access the cached version of a webpage, like the one above, by searching for it on Google, clicking on the green down arrow directly to the right of a result URL, and clicking “Cached.” Click here to see the cached page for Google.com.
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.