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!
We’re guessing most of us here do as much shopping as possible online, but for those unavoidable store visits, Google has published some infographics showing you the dates and times you want to be a long, long way from them.
Unsurprisingly, consumer electronics stores are busiest on Black Friday, but if you’re determined to snag that bargain despite the crowds, the time you really want to avoid is 2-4pm …
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We told you early this year that Google added a mortgage calculator to Search, and now the company is taking things a step further. As was first mentioned by Google all the way back in May of this year, Google Compare for U.S. mortgages has now launched in California — with more states to follow…
Google Compare for mortgages provides a seamless, intuitive experience that connects lenders with borrowers online. Whether you’re a national lender or one local to California, people searching for mortgages on their smartphone or desktop computer can now find you, along with a real-time, apples-to-apples comparison of rate quotes from other lenders — all in as little as a minute.
You can head over to the Compare site to check out the new tool, and if you reside in California, you can actually use it. If you’re not one of the lucky souls that lives in the Golden State, you can of course use the quick mortgage calculator in search.
The latest numbers in Google’s transparency report show that the search giant currently receives more than 65 million requests a month to remove links to pirated content – which works out at 2M per day, or 1,500 per minute.
That’s a doubling in number in a little over a year, the company reporting that takedown requests hit 1M in August 2014. Go back to 2011, and the numbers were measured in the mere hundreds.
Google introduced a new automated system last year designed to help fight piracy …
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A report by the UK’s telecoms and Internet watchdog Ofcom says that children are too trusting of what they find on the web, a surprisingly high percentage of them taking search results on trust, and unable to identify paid ads.
One in five online 12-15s (19%) believe information returned by a search engine such as Google or Bing must be true, yet only a third of 12-15s (31%) are able to identify paid-for adverts in these results.
The report found that the position was even worse with YouTube …
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Google acquired app streaming startup Agawi earlier this year, and now it looks like the Mountain View company is putting their technology to good use. As of today, users will be able to stream certain apps straight from Google’s mobile search results. Google is also going to show “app-first” content (that without a web-based counterpart) in search results starting today as well…
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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.
According to a report this morning from The Wall Street Journal, Google will now be able to show publicly available info from the Facebook app in mobile searches. Clicking on such a link while on your smartphone will take users directly to the relevant part of the Facebook app. The agreement between Google and Facebook went into affect last Friday, according to an Alphabet spokesperson.
Earlier this year, Google called on community artists in San Francisco to design the doors to some of its cute prototype self-driving cars. The contest’s winners were announced in late September, but now Google has come out on Google+ to post the first picture of some of the custom paint jobs now mostly finished and ready to hit the road.
We’ve been following the self-driving car program pretty closely as of late, and told you just last week that the cars haven’t seen an accident in over two months despite driving 100k miles. Also of note in recent weeks, Nest CEO Tony Fadell came out to say in an interview with Bloomberg that riding in the cars feels like being taxied by a professional driver.
Up to June of this year, Google’s self-driving cars had yet to be at fault in any accidents, and it seems that record has held true over the last few months. Of the dozen or so accidents up to that point, the majority had happened when the self-driving car wasn’t even moving, and the rest occurred when Google’s safety drivers were in control of the vehicles.
Unfortunately, in the months after Google released the first report, Google’s cars continued to see a couple of accidents per month. But that trend has come to an interesting halt recently. As we’ve learned thanks to Google’s recently-published October report, the self-driving cars have now gone more than two months without a single accident…
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Tony Fadell, often called the “father of the iPod” and now CEO of Alphabet’s Nest, appeared on Bloomberg TV today to discuss his time at Apple, his current effort in the connected home industry and the future of mobility. He briefly talked about Google’s self-driving car project and confirmed he spent some time in the vehicles. He compared the experience to being driven by a “professional driver”.
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With Google potentially facing a fine of up to $6.6B after the European Commission charged the company of abusing its dominant position in search, its lawyers have now filed a 130-page rebuttal. In it, the company attempts to use a legal technicality to argue that it cannot be fined for favouring its own products in search results …
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There’s nothing worse when browsing the web — or hitting a search result — and coming across a page completely obscured by a huge pop-up window asking you to install the site’s (or someone else’s) app. In fact, full-page interstitial ads in general are incredibly frustrating, when all you want to do is read the article. Thankfully, Google is doing something about it…
Google releases a report about its self-driving car project every month, and now the company has released October’s numbers. There’s not much new information this time around, but numbers like miles driven in both autonomous and manual modes have obviously increased. Interestingly, while the number of self-driving cars on the road has stayed the same, the number of cars on the road in Austin, TX has decreased…
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Google’s self-driving cars are aware that children can be less predictable than adults, being programmed to act more cautiously around them. But to do that, they first need to be able to identify them as children – something which can be more challenging when they’re wearing costumes – so Google took advantage of Halloween to give the cars some additional learning.
This week, lots of little ghouls, superheroes and even robots were running around Google with their families, so we asked them to hang out around our parked cars. This gives our sensors and software extra practice at recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they’re in odd costumes …
While it seems near-certain that Google plans a full-scale commercial rollout of its self-driving cars, it has also made clear on several occasions that it has no plans to manufacture the cars itself. As a recent opinion piece on sister site Electrek argued, actually manufacturing a car is massively complex undertaking.
Google will therefore be looking for partners to pull together different elements of the car, and Re/code has put together an interesting look at the most likely candidates. Though the piece is focused on the Apple Car, the analysis applies to Apple and Google alike …
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It’s no surprise that Google employs artificial intelligence to help parse search queries, but it did surprise me to learn that a full 15% of Google searches are ones its systems have never seen before. It’s these that the company has been decoding with the help of an AI system called RankBrain, reports Bloomberg.
For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.
As you’d expect, Google uses literally hundreds of different ‘signals’ to make sense of searches, and the vast majority of these are based on discoveries and insights that people in the team have had – but RankBrain is the first system that genuinely learns …
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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…
Google’s driverless car project has been long in the making. The company lead development in the field since 2009 and as of September 30, they have accumulated 1,210,676 miles on autonomous mode through 2 fleets: one in Mountain View, CA and one Austin, TX. Google’s latest official comments on the timeframe of the project suggested a commercialization of the technology around 2020, but a consultant on Google’s driverless team revealed that the vehicle could be ready in less than 3 years…
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Google has launched its Doodle 4 Google campaign for 2015 and is inviting US school pupils of all ages to submit their entries. The winner will get their artwork shown on the Google homepage for one day, and one winner will also get a $30,000 college scholarship. The theme of this year’s contest is “What makes me…me”, and artists are encouraged to use any material they like to create their doodle…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference a couple of days ago to explain the Autopilot features included in the company’s 7.0 software update, but LIDAR, one of the remote sensing technologies that Google uses in its self-driving car, also came up briefly. Elon Musk had some bold comments about to use of LIDAR in autonomous vehicles, in response to one inquiry from a WSJ reporter, which questioned whether the Model S would need more sensors for greater levels autonomy…
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Starting on January 1st, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to open its roads to testing of automated vehicles, according to a recent report (via CBC). The province will allow testing of self-driving cars (Google has been a pioneer in the space with both its Lexus models and its smaller, prototype EVs), as well as “related technologies,” starting on January 1st 2016…
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Google’s self-driving cars may have an impressive safety record – having never caused an accident in more than a million miles of driving on public roads – but the company admits that their ultra-cautious approach can make them a little unpredictable and annoying to other drivers, reports the WSJ. Examples include taking a very wide approach on turns, and braking at the slightest sign of danger.
The cars are “a little more cautious than they need to be,” Chris Urmson, who leads Google’s effort to develop driverless cars, [said]. “We are trying to make them drive more humanistically” …
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…
