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Adam Savage of MythBusters fame gave an interesting interview with Google X’s Astro Teller back in October and you can now view the full video thanks to Tested. In the 25-minute video interview, which can be seen above, the two talk about a variety topics, ranging from Astro Teller’s childhood to Google’s self-driving cars. Another interesting topic discussed are the smart contact lenses the company is developing, as well as its goal to bring internet connectivity to everywhere.

Adam Savage welcomes Astro Teller to The Talking Room! Astro is Google’s ‘Captain of Moonshots’, directing the Google X lab where self-driving cars, smart contact lenses, and other futuristic projects are conceived and made real. Adam sat down with Astro at the Tested Live Show this past October to chat about the benefits of thinking big and failing quickly.

You can view the full video interview above.

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According to a recent post on Google+, Google’s new cute self-driving car prototypes are now driving the roads of Mountain View. As was mentioned previously, they’re taking some cues from how the company’s previous line of Lexus self-driving vehicles. This first run of a few of the new ‘Koala’ prototype will have a safety driver on board with a “removable” steering wheel, accelerator, and brake — just in case…

These prototype vehicles are designed from the ground up to be fully self-driving. They’re ultimately designed to work without a steering wheel or pedals, but during this phase of our project we’ll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow them to take over driving if needed. The prototypes’ speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph, and they’ll drive using the same software that our existing Lexus vehicles use—the same fleet that has self-driven over 1 million miles since we started the project.

According to Google, the speed of the cars is currently capped at a pretty conservative 25 miles per hour, and they’re driving around at that “neighborhood-friendly” speed using the same software that powered the Lexus line. Ultimately, the goal is for them to be completely autonomous, but it would make sense that Google wants to take that slow to avoid any more sensationalized stories about their safety…
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Google has a new update out to its Remarketing Lists for Search Ads product that will make it easier for marketers to use Analytics to target the right potential customers and in the process get a higher return on their advertising dollar investment. And while these terms might sound like complete gibberish to you, from a high-level it’s actually not too complicated.

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Update: What’s that? Oh, just the smell of change. After initially standing firm on its implementation of the hotwording module and proprietary Google extension being automatically downloaded in new installations of the Chromium open source browser, a wave of criticism has led to the team pulling it out of Chromium 45 and onwards. The module that manages whether the hotword listening extension is enabled will be “disabled by default” and the proprietary technology that actually listens for “Ok Google” will not download. A member of the team says simply:

In light of this issue, we have decided to remove the hotwording component entirely from Chromium. As it is not open source, it does not belong in the open source browser.

The original story continues below.

It all started with a blinking LED light. Ofer Zelig wrote on his blog today about an odd case where the LED light on his computer, that turns on whenever the microphone or camera is activated, seemed to blink every few seconds or so while he was working on his PC. He investigated in the Windows Task Manager to look for any process that might be to blame – no dice. He shut down some suspicious processes that might have been causing it and says he didn’t have any malware installed, but still to no avail. Turns out, the culprit was none other than Google’s Chrome browser…

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Google in an announcement today on its blog on public policy issues said that it will soon have a web form for victims of revenge porn to complete in order to have links to the offending images removed from global search results.

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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.

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If you’re anything like me, at some point during your day you’ll consciously think to yourself about what time you’d like to get up the next day. You’ll think about it, but then just forget to set an alarm on your phone before you go to sleep and end up waking at a different time than you’d like. Well, there’s a neat card in Google search that can be evoked with a simply query that may help you with this problem.

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Speaking in an interview with CNBC, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said that the company’s traffic has grown 600 percent over the past two years. A variety of factors likely played a role in this explosion of growth, but it is mainly attributable to the NSA’s surveillance program, which was revealed two years ago. It has been reported in the past that the NSA tapped into Google servers and accessed the data of millions of users.

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Google has so far been meeting the controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ ruling in Europe by removing links only from the local site for each country – google.com remaining unaffected. A French court ruled last November that removing links from google.fr was insufficient, and ordered Google to remove the links worldwide.

Google ignored the ruling, and Reuters now reports that the French data protection regulator CNIL has given the company 15 days to comply before imposing sanctions … 
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How many calories does all that Android have?

Google showed off its new photo storage service at I/O last week with features including unlimited backup and searching for images by keywords, but the company has another image-related technology in development. Google can already recognize images of food when you search your photo library, but its currently developing technology that goes a step further by actually counting the calories in your meal based on your food shots. This could make dieting and calorie counting much more convenient in the future if it works well enough…
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Cue the “Google+ is dead” jokes, and the following “was Google+ ever alive?” remarks.

Google has today removed the link to users’ Google+ profile from the top its many web properties, most notably its front search page and Gmail web app. Previously, names appeared with a plus in front like “+Stephen” and would link to your Google+ profile. From today, it looks like Google is making the name label no longer a link, and moving the “+Stephen” Google+ link to the app drop-down menu…
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<a href="http://recode.net/2015/05/27/google-confirms-buy-button-is-coming/">Image via Re/code</a> 

Speaking at the Code Conference in California, Google’s chief business officer Omid Kordestani confirmed that the company is in fact planning on adding a “buy” button to search results. This feature has been rumored for several months and is a way for Google to compete more seriously with the likes of Amazon and eBay.

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 Google’s App Indexing technology isn’t exactly the most exciting thing to discuss, but so long as the majority of the company’s revenue still comes from search (it does), it is imperative that they figure out how to make their main business work on mobile where the eyeballs are going. So the company announced that today App Indexing is coming to iOS apps, starting with Chrome and Google Search.

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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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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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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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Following up on Google’s agreement with Twitter to instantly add tweets to web search results, the duo announced today that users on mobile devices will start seeing real-time Twitter results as well. The feature is available in the Google app on Android or Google’s mobile website, and is expected to make its way to the desktop soon.

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