Items tagged with Search
Google is once again in hot water with the European Union (EU). This time around, the United States-based search giant has run afoul of the EU's consumer protection and antitrust regulations with regards to how it present search results for hotels and airline flights At the heart of the issues are search results for Google Flight and Google Hotels. According to EU regulatory bodies, Google does not do enough to allow consumers to make informed decisions on travel arrangements. More specifically, Google leaves out details such as any applicable taxes or fees, which could substantially raise the cost of flights or lodging. Google has the ability to display this information in its search results,...
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If you are doing a search in the outback, it may become significantly more difficult soon if Google keeps its threats. Recently, the Mountain View-based search engine company has been butting heads with the Australian government, which introduced rules that could force content aggregators, like Google, to pay for compiled news articles. At a recent Australian Senate committee hearing, Google stated that if the proposed code becomes law, it will shut off search in Australia. Crikey! Earlier today, the search giant’s local managing director and VP of Australia and New Zealand, Melanie Silva, delivered the shut-off threat to the senate committee. She went on to explain that “It’s...
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Last year Google was hit with a massive $5 billion fine by the European Commission. Along with that fine, Google was forced to implement new screens to ask users if they wanted additional browsers and search engines on the device at setup. Google has found a way to make lemonade out of the lemons given to it by the European Commission and has started to charge search engine providers. The new Android "choice screen" that the European Commission forced Google to adopt will land in early 2020 for users in Europe and will allow them to pick the default search engine that is featured in the home screen widget. Google will also install the app associated with the search engine choice the user makes....
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We have all heard of the dark web: a lawless digital world, uncharted and unstructured, full of data -- much of it illegally acquired and illegally for sale -- that cannot be viewed without special tools: proxy servers, TOR browsers, and the like. It's a murky and mysterious place, a place where much information resides, but is difficult to unearth for the uninitiated. Until now. Canada's Echosec Systems Ltd. recently released Beacon, a security tool that's designed to shed some light on the dark web. Karl Swannie is the CEO of Echosec, the company behind Beacon. "Beacon is a dark web search engine that allows users to search anonymously, without the need for a TOR browser," says Echosec...
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One of the most prevalent problems on the web, and especially social media, is discerning legitimate news stories from ones that are outright fake. This has led to the use (and sometimes overuse) of the term "fake news." This typically applies to full fledged articles, though it's actually really easy to manipulate Google's search results to support a false narrative. For example, it's possible to construct a seemingly legitimate Google search URL for "Where was Barack Obama born" and have the result display Kenya, or "By whom was Donald Trump endorsed" and have the result show Pope Francis. Those are both false—Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, and Pope Francis didn't endorse...
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When it comes to big data, Apple CEO Tim Cook has drawn a line in the sand with regards to what it will and will not do when it comes to customer data. Apple vows not to share its customer data with third-parties and takes great pain to store as much customer user data in a secure enclave on-device with products like the iPhone instead of sending information to its servers. Because of this policy, Cook has been rather outspoken about criticizing tech giants like Google and Facebook for their lapses in protecting user data. With that in mind, in an interview with Axios on HBO, Cook was asked why Apple feels comfortable taking billions from Google to place...
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Google has been the sultan of search for a very long time now, and through the years it has constantly been tweaking things, adding features, and generally just looking to stay in front of the pack. Most would argue it's done exactly that—'Google' is basically a verb in modern vernacular. To keep things going in that direction, Google is introducing a bunch of new and improved search features, with a particular emphasis on visual content, as it looks to towards the next two decades of search. While most of us take the underlying technology for granted, there are some interesting things at play. One of them is Google continually leveraging advancements in computer vision. "We model hundreds...
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In May, it was reported that Google workers were quitting over Google's involvement with a Pentagon project called Project Maven. Eventually, a petition made the rounds with Google workers demanding that the search giant sever ties with the military project. A new report is making the rounds that claims Googlers are quitting in protest to the relaunch of Google search in the Chinese market. Jack Poulson, identified as a senior Google research scientist in the research and machine intelligence department, quit in protest of Google's plans to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Chinese government has notoriously tight control over internet searches within the...
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Google is working hard to improve natural language understanding and one of the key areas that is being used to improve that understanding is the development of word vectors. A word vector allows machine learning algorithms to understand the relationship between words based on actual language usage. This has led to Semantic Experiences such as Talk to Books that Google unveiled this week. The tech is similar to what Google uses in Smart Reply for Gmail. Talk to Books is a new way to explore books that starts at a sentence level. This allows you to enter a sentence or ask a question and the tool will find sentences in books that respond to your question. There is no dependence on keyword...
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If you're a devout Google Images user, you may have already noticed a subtle, but very obvious change made over the past day. It used to be that when you found an image you liked, you could click on it, and then use the "View Image" option to see only that image. If you wanted to see the rest of the website, you had to use another option, "Visit Site". In a stealth update, Google decided to remove the View Image option, which means that if you find an image you like, you will have to visit the website and find the image yourself. This could be seen as a way to promote more traffic to websites that are hosting the images, or at least reduce the risk of copyrighted or otherwise protected images...
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Google has announced a significant change in how it handles digital publications that show stories and news items on Google Search results and on Google News. Google had a policy in place in the past called First Click Free that required websites listed in Google News or in Google's search results to offer a minimum of three free articles per day to readers. After those three free stories daily were consumed by the reader, they could be shown a paywall to try and convert the reader to a subscriber. Online news fans aren't known to be the sort who pay for news that is perceived as being a free service. Google is changing its stance, which could mean that news from some publications via Google...
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When the European Union comes at technology firms for perceived antitrust violations, it comes at them hard. Such is the case yet again, this time with the European Commission issuing a record-breaking fine of €2.42 billion (around $2.7 billion in U.S. currency) to Google for running afoul of antitrust law. The fine is more than double the previous largest penalty issued for an antitrust violation. Following a seven-year investigation, the EU determined that Google abused its dominant market position to promote its own comparison shopping results while actively suppressing the competition. Should the decision be upheld pending an inevitable appeal, it would force Google to rethink how it presents...
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Google wants to help put you to work. Through changes Google has made to its advanced search engine, you can now look for job openings simply by searching for them and receive more detailed results than before. The new ability is part of the "Google for Jobs" initiative that was announced at Google I/O earlier this year, whereby Google committed to working with both job seekers and employers to bring suitable candidates together. The ability to search for jobs is now available in English on desktop and mobile. How it works is you can search for "jobs near me," "teaching jobs," or plug in some other similar search query and you'll receive in-depth results that allow you to explore job openings...
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Google has started experimenting with a mobile-first approach to indexing webpages. The reason for change is because these days "most people" who search for something on Google are doing so on their mobile device. As things exist, Google's ranking system still looks at a desktop version of a page's content to evaluate its relevance to the user even though the mobile may see something different. "This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher," Google explains. "To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first." Google shot down the...
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We’ve stated on many occasions that Windows 10 is an excellent operating system, albeit one with a few rough edges that could be smoothed-out. However, Microsoft has angered some users over the past year or so, in its willingness to dance right up to the line of what customers feel is acceptable practice for promoting adoption of its new OS. Further, some feel the company crossed that line with respect to user data collection and privacy concerns. It looks as though Microsoft stands to garner more criticism if its recent patent filing comes to life in a production software product. The title of the company's patent filing is “Query Formulation Via Task Continuum” and it aims to make it easier...
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One of the most obvious facts on Earth is that Google loves search. It's for good reason: it's how the company began, and it's what's needed to fuel its products outside of search. There's a reason most of the world's population goes to Google over other providers for search: the big G is really good at it. Well, what about searching for information that's not in a singular place; or, information you need but you can't remember where you stored it? Take for example a scenario where a friend gave you an address, but you can't remember whether it was sent to you through Gmail, Hangouts, or something else. For that, Google introduces "In App" search. At the moment, only a handful of apps support...
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If Google had been hoping that the European Union would back off on its pursuit of proving that it's anti-competitive, it appears that the company hasn't been hoping hard enough. Today, the EU shot another set of charges at Google for anti-competitive practices, this time squarely targeting its AdSense for Search platform. Previous antitrust charges against Google have involved Android, search, and shopping, with this third set expanding on the latter two. Anyone who's ever browsed the internet will have likely passed by an AdSense advertisement, as they're simply everywhere. We reinforce Google case on search/shopping comparison with new, strong evidence and send statement of objections t Google...
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We've all seen shady pitches to sell software and services that purport to fix our PCs, restore system performance, recover lost passwords, and so forth. The problem is many of them are outright scams. Rather than try to wade through them all and let only the good ones through, Microsoft has decided to ban all online technical support services from advertising on Bing. Microsoft's concern is over the "serious quality issues that can impact user safety," which is a polite way of calling scam services out on their shenanigans. There is no magic software elixir to turn a dilapidated PC into a smoking fast hotrod, and unfortunately there are many third-party tech support services that outright lie...
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“I see a blue link and I want to paint it black.” Taking a cue from The Rolling Stones, it looks as though Google is looking to possibly change things up on its iconic search page by painting its search links black. While this might not initially seem like a big deal to switch from blue to black links in Google’s search results, users that have been thrust into the limited A/B testing are already revolting. Up until this week, users saw link names in blue and the actual URL right below in green. But with the link names now black, users are complaining that the change is actually a step backwards in usability, making it harder to see which links have already been clicked:Really doesn't make a...
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Google today announced that it's adding live TV listings to search. That means when you perform search for a TV show, such as Lucifer or Billions (both highly recommended, by the way), you'll not only see apps and sites where you can catch the latest episode, but also see which channel(s) you can tune to in the evening for a live viewing. Of course, this can be a little tricky with there being so many different cable and satellite TV providers. To make sure the information it's providing to you is relevant, Google will let you select your specific provider for personalized results. You'll also see cards that provide additional information about the content you're looking up. "There are now more...
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The threat has been looming for a while, and now it's official. The EU has fired off its second set of antitrust charges at Google. Both antitrust accusations happened in under two years, and revolve around how Google handles its Android OS and the power it wields over OEMs. Part of this accusation implies that Google has required Google Search to be default on Android, and has even offered financial incentives to have it act as the exclusive provider. The issue here is obvious: by wiping out the potential for competition to mosey on in, you've created a monopoly. European Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager stated, "Google’s behavior has harmed consumers by stifling competition and harming...
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After falling short of financial expectations in the third quarter of 2015, Yahoo is hoping that Google can be the catalyst in its ongoing turnaround effort. As such, Yahoo is turning to the Mountain View giant to provide a bit of search and advertising as the company narrows its focus on its core business. More on the deal in a moment, but first, let's have a look at some numbers. Yahoo reported $1.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $1.15 billion in the same quarter a year ago. However, net income was only $76 million, or 8 cents a share, way down from $6.77 billion, or $6.70 a share, from a year ago. Yahoo also reported a $42 million write-down related to its original video content,...
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