YouTube is rolling out a redesigned Home interface for the Android and iOS app. The new design is cleaner and simpler, but also takes advantage of deep neural networks to better recommend videos for users to watch.
Google Maps is expanding its ‘Explore around you’ feature to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Japan. The tool helps users find places to grab a meal or drink based on location and lists them as pre-made categories.
Google is making some announcements for its Google for Work platform today at the Web Summit in Dublin, including the introduction of a new program dubbed “Recommended for Google Apps for Work” and an update on paid user numbers.
In addition to announcing the new app recommendations, Google’s Amit Singh unveiled that the company has now hit over 2 million businesses with paid Google Apps for Work accounts:
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Google Maps on mobile has since last year had an Explore section where users can find the best restaurants to eat at and things to do in their area. With an update rolling out today to the Android app, it’s becoming a bit more easy to specify and narrow down exactly what you’re looking for.
Prior to today, Explore only used the inputs of distance and time of day to determine what to show you. Users can now, however, specify a nearby neighborhood, category, and type of cuisine to find, on top of the existing inputs. Tapping on a suggested place will bring up more detail like who the vibe is best, or least, suited for, and sometimes it’ll include why Google chose to recommend that place in particular.
It seems crazy to me that Explore in Google Maps was lacking this type of gradual search before, but it was. The new inputs make perfect sense, too — what if I specifically want to find a place to have drinks with friends, and also make sure it’s not too upscale of a place? You couldn’t narrow your results down that far before, but now you can. Well, that’s if you’re in the US or UK, where the Explore update is limited to for now. And if you happen to be in NYC, San Francisco or London, Google will even curate its suggestions into named sections like “Best places for classic Mission-style Mexican food.”
Aside from the new search, the UI has been updated a bit with a card-based interface for swiping through suggested places and their corresponding photos. This interface closely matches what Google rolled out to its search product on mobile for rich content results just a few days ago. Maps for Android also recently saw its directions interface updated with a similar tabbed design displaying duration estimates for every form of transportation to a given location.
Other location-based recommendation apps like Foursquare and Yelp have had what Google is rolling out now for quite a while, it’s worth noting. When I find an APK for this new update I’ll be sure to update this post.
Just as news hit this morning that the European Commission approved Apple’s acquisition of Beats, the Beats Music mobile apps, Android included, just received an update with a number of notable new features.
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Google News just launched a new Editors’ Picks feature that provides a personal, human touch, straying from the “generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors” approach of the past.
The new feature won’t exactly have Google employees suggesting their favorite articles, but rather aggregate content that publications have highlighted as being their “most engaging content”. Editors’ Picks will be available initially in the right column of the U.S. Google News page and display content from nearly two dozen publications Google has selected to participate. The feeds you will see in the new feature will depend on your news preferences.
Publications and news organizations can head over to the News Help Center to learn more.
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