Google

Google’s existing Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 handsets

With Google reporting falling revenues from its Nexus devices, and having seemingly abandoned the original concept of an affordable vanilla device in favor of more expensive devices, the future of the product line was looking a little uncertain. But a new rumor says that Google will indeed be continuing the Nexus program – and not just with one new smartphone, but two.

Android Police cites a “reliable source” in suggesting that Google is partnering with two different manufacturers: with LG for a 5.2-inch smartphone code-named Angler, and with Huawei for a 5.7-inch phablet code-named Bullhead … 
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Today we’re getting a look at an upcoming new version of the Google Photos app courtesy of some screenshots obtained by AndroidPolice. The app features a new Assistant mode that appears to replace the old Autoawesome feature with a more manual editing experience, as well as something new features and tweaks to the overall user experience.
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While Google has been working hard to become a more diverse company, you don’t necessarily see much diversity in image searches. Carry out a neutral search on Google Images for terms like man, woman, face or hand, and the vast majority of search results show white people.

The World White Web project aims to change that, by the simple mechanism of asking people to share images of people of color, which boosts their search rankings in Google, increasing the racial diversity of search results … 
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Launched in September 2008, Google’s Chrome browser is now dominant in its share of the desktop web browser market, with approximately 1 in 4 Internet users interfacing with the web using the browser. What many Chrome users probably don’t know, however, is that it’s actually based off the open source Chromium browser, also developed by Google. Up until today Chrome for Android differed from its desktop counterpart in that it’s codebase wasn’t open source – meaning, the code for the app wasn’t publicly available for other developers to view, modify, and build upon. That changed today.

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Following the recent rebrand of Google’s Webmaster Tools to “Search Console,” the Mountain View company has now announced that it is introducing new reports to help app developers get better insight into how their indexed Android app is performing in search…
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While Google’s ad business is definitely in a transition phase, largely due to the shift away from personal computers towards mobile handsets, Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy says that the company is handling this move well. Selling ads to advertisers may be harder with more of those ads ending up on mobile devices with smaller screens than notebooks and desktops, meaning more difficulty for customers to complete purchases, but Google is definitely taking steps toward slowing the rapid decline in ad prices.

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, while Google is making several moves to make advertising more valuable, the market’s more recent move to larger-screened devices has helped significantly…
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Earlier this month, Google began sending the first invites to users for its Project Fi wireless carrier initiative. Users receiving invites have been rare so far and this evening Google sent an update email to those who requested an invite at launch. Unfortunately, the email being sent to users today doesn’t include an invite, but rather only an update on the process of the rollout.

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Google today updated its Hangouts Chrome app with an entirely new interface. Perhaps more notably than that, the app has support for Mac OS X users in addition to the trio of Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS. The UI has been refreshed to be more similar to the Android version of the app, a trend that has been increasingly common for Google services over the past few months.

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Earlier this week, users discovered an issue with Google Maps that centered around typing in a racial slur and being directed to The White House. This evening, Google has issued an apology on its official Maps blog. The company says that it is “deeply upset” by the issue and is currently in the process of fixing it.

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Have you ever seen a product or service in a YouTube video ad and wished it were easier to learn more or purchase it? Me neither, but Google believes its new TrueView for shopping ad format will result in stronger results for advertisers looking to drive increased interest and sales. 
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Gartner today released the results of a report finding that Chromebooks in 2015 have continued to see double-digit year-over-year growth for Google with education still as the primary market for browser-based computers. 7.3 million Chromebook units are expected to be sold in 2015, a 27 percent increase over 2014, while 72 percent of those sales are expected to be from the education sector.

In the above chart breaking down Chromebook sales for 2014 by region and segment, you can see education held the lion’s share in all the major markets Google sells to, with consumer sales coming in second, and sales to the business segment trailing far behind – save for in Asia Pacific, where those latter two are reversed.
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A multinational government group known as the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the spy group comprising Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand – planned to hack Android phones by compromising both Google and Samsung app stores. The plan was revealed in newly-released Snowden files dating back to 2012, reports CBC News.

Five Eyes specifically sought ways to find and hijack data links to servers used by Google and Samsung’s mobile app stores [trying] to find ways to implant spyware on smartphones by intercepting the transmissions sent when downloading or updating apps.

The alliance planned to begin by analyzing traffic to the stores to identify the Internet usage habits of targets (such as which apps they used), but the ultimate goal was to plant spyware that would enable them to extract data from targeted smartphones, or even to take control of them … 
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Google announced today in a blog post that it is renaming its popular Google Webmaster Tools service to Google Search Console after nearly 10 years of existence. Aside from the different name, no other changes are being made to Google Search Console. Google, of course, updates the service with new features on a regular basis, though.

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“Adblockers,” browser tools which work to hide ads from the web browsing experience, are a controversial topic of discussion among those in the media industry. And for good reason, as the media industry as a whole is in the midst of a large shift from creating content for – and earning a vast majority of revenue from – the print and desktop mediums, where large boxy ads have long reigned king. But when we talk about adblockers, the one tool we’re all probably referring to, the one which has become synonymous with the term, is Adblock Plus (ABP), and the company behind it has released a dedicated browser for Android…

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According to sources for Bloomberg, Google is set to announce an “an online picture sharing and storage service” separate of Google+. This isn’t exactly groundbreaking news, but it’s further confirmation of something we’ve been hearing about since as far back as August of last year.

Google Inc. is set to reveal an online picture sharing and storage service that will no longer be part of the Google+ social network, people familiar with the plans said.

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Late last year Samsung used a punchy video on YouTube to introduce a new platform “that allows users to seamlessly transition their activities across their devices.” They called it Samsung Flow, and today it has finally become available in the Google Play Store with the “beta” moniker slapped to the end of its name.

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Google’s family-friendly YouTube Kids app has been hit with a second complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, this time accusing it of containing inappropriate content, including sexually-explicit language and “jokes about pedophilia.” This follows a complaint last month that the app was “deceptive to children” in the way it mixed ads into the programming.

The WSJ reports that the complaint was sent by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy.

Examples of what the non-profit groups found include: explicit sexual language in cartoons; jokes about pedophilia and drug use; activities such as juggling knives, tasting battery acid, and making a noose; and adult discussions about family violence, pornography, and child suicide.

The group created a video (below) illustrating the inappropriate content found … 
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Rumors that Google has big plans for virtual reality seem to be gathering pace. After yesterday learning that the lead designer of Google Search is now heading up Google Cardboard, another engineer believed to be working on the projected has hinted at an announcement at Google I/O … 
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