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ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters. He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience. Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....
A common trope in crime films and TV shows is the ability for law enforcement agencies to zoom in on grainy photos and security camera footage, and ‘enhance‘ the pixelated image like it’s no big deal – making detective work a breeze. The fact is that it’s usually impossible to achieve this because there isn’t enough detail in a small number of pixels to eke out a clearer image than what you already have in the original file. But it looks like a bunch of Google researchers have figured out a way to do that – or at least get pretty darn close....
Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.” Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5bn a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”...
According to comScore’s most recent desktop search engine rankings, “Google Sites led the explicit core search market in February with 64 percent of search queries conducted.” In an overall sense, this proves one thing to be true: Google has captured the majority of search traffic.
However, you don’t want to ignore the other 36 percent. Here is a breakdown of the search engines that make up the “best of the rest.” - Microsoft sites: 21.4 percent
- Yahoo sites: 12.2 percent
- Ask Network: 1.6 percent
- AOL: 0.9 percent.
These numbers are nowhere as extensive as Google’s, but it does show that people are using other search engines....
A huge amount of time in a content marketer’s day is spent perusing the web. Having your browser perfectly armored with great plug-ins and extensions helps you save time, be more productive, and generally make your work much, much easier. It also is crucial to know how to make the most of available tools in optimizing each step of your efforts.
Here are my favorite choices of the best available browser extensions and how their features can make a content marketer’s life much easier. Each browser link listed connects directly to the extension for easy add-on....
What’s even more painful is that the road to recovery is a long one. Google processes less than 1 reconsideration request for every 20 penalties. And after filing such a request it takes about 4 weeks to hear back from Google.
You should not panic and get frustrated. But take immediate action.
The brighter side of the picture is only 5% of webmasters actually attempt to recover from a penalty.
So if you’re reading this article, you belong to the elite class.
I want to share 11 tools and strategies to help you recover from link penalties. They’ll also help you to stay in the safe zone....
Google’s Street View team does an awesome job in getting just about everywhere these days, from the Great Barrier Reef to the top of Mount Fuji to inside the world’s largest passenger plane.
However, a somewhat brave attempt to offer stay-at-home travelers an immersive view of one of the world’s most bizarre festivals ended in failure this week when the camera-equipped car ended up being overrun by revelers. Oh, and tomatoes, too.
Yes, this was La Tomatina, an annual event in the town of Buñol in eastern Spain that sees some 30,000 people from around the world hitting the streets with the sole intention of laying waste to 150 tons of tomatoes....
No taste? No problem. Google's got you covered.
By now, we’ve all heard of Google’s enticing pitch on Material Design—their design language that re-imagines the pieces of user interface as real, physical objects. But while Google offers tools for any Android developer to build an app that adheres to Material Design standards, what if you just want to make a snazzy, Material Design website?
Now, Google has released a tool to make the process simple. It’s calledMaterial Design Lite, and it’s a site filled with copy-and-pasteable code that you can use to create Material Design websites in CSS, HTML and JavaScript....
Learn more about Google's new mobile friendly guidelines and algorithm.If you're interested in learning more about mobile sites, check out our Webmaster's Mobile Guide or the Principles of Site Designon Web Fundamentals....
Yahoo had already been around for about four years when Google launched in 1998. At the time, Yahoo was the one to beat.
Google beat Yahoo and everyone else in its path. In fact, Google is now the most used search engine on the web and owns at least 67 percent of search traffic.
Over time, Google faced competition, if you can call it that, from Yahoo and Microsoft (which later became Bing), and that was mostly a battle for PPC dollars. Now, Google faces inspired competition from Amazon and Facebook. Neither is trying to simply copy Google. The battle is much bigger than that.
Here’s why Amazon and Facebook are about to make things more interesting....
Want to find out all the things Google knows about you?
Here are 6 links that will show you some of the data Google has about you....
Google has gone through a lot of executive changes this year. Last month, the company's chief business officer Nikesh Arora announced he was leaving. And in February longtime ad boss Susan Wojcicki left that post to replace YouTube chief Salar Kamangar as the CEO of the Google-owned video service.
Ms. Wojcicki's appointment overshadowed another leadership shift. A year after being charged with running Google's advertising and commerce organization alongside Ms. Wojcicki, Google Senior VP-Advertising and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy had taken full responsibility for the division that accounted for more than 91% of the company's $55 billion in revenue last year.
The 11-year Google vet, who started in 2003 as an engineer on Google's search-ads team, now oversees search, display, video, analytics, shopping, payments and travel product lines. He discussed his new role in an interview below....
Has Google's moment of radical innovation been exposed as only that? A moment? In an economy where everyone is counting on innovation, and counting on the private sector to provide it, two events at the end of last week leave me worried.
The first one was Google's plunging share price. The company is still doing well. But suddenly shareholders came face to face with what in Canada we might call "the Nortel realization." That is, the sudden comprehension that a share price based on expectations of ever higher future returns cannot be sustained by high, but constant, returns.
The other event was ostensibly positive. For the first time, the world's biggest internet search company gave a reporter a behind-the-scenes look at Google X, the company's division charged with engineering a radical future....
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Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud, came on stage at Google’s Next Cloud conference today to talk about the current and next-generation applications of AI that Google’s working on. These technologies will make a difference in self-driving cars and healthcare, sure, but also Snapchat’s filters and Google Photos’ search capabilities. But the big highlight came when she announced a new way to allow software to parse video.
This new “Video Intelligence API” was demoed onstage, and it offered the kind of “whoa” moment you expect from a Google keynote. By playing a short commercial, the API was able to identify the dachshund in the video, when it appeared in the video, and then understand that the whole thing was a commercial. In another demo, we saw a simple search for “beach” and was able to find videos which had scenes from beaches in them, complete with timestamps. That’s similar to how Google Photos lets you search for “sunset” and pull up your best late-day snapshots.
Before now, computers couldn’t really understand the content of a video directly without manual tagging. “We are beginning to shine light on the dark matter of the digital universe,” Li said. At least in Google’s demo, it was genuinely impressive. And Google is making the API available to developers, just as it has with its other machine learning APIs.
Google Shopping is offering a virtual tour of New York’s renowned holiday windows, Winter Wonderland, which allows consumers to use a smartphone or computer to see windows from 18 stores, including Lord & Taylor’s Enchanted Forest, as well as Barney’s — in which artist Nick Cave tackles race and gender — and Saks 5th Avenue, which features couture gowns from designers that were inspired by holiday treats. “We’ve taken hundreds of high-resolution photos of each window and stitched them together with a new technique that creates a rich, life-like panorama — you’ll feel like you’re standing on the streets of Manhattan during the holidays, gazing at the windows as if you were walking next to them,” Aman Govil, Google's head of art, copy and code projects, wrote in a blog post. What’s more, users with virtual reality headsets like Google Cardboard or Daydream can also hear surrounding sounds and sights, Google said....
Last week Google made a number of major announcements. There’s nothing unusual about that, of course, except this time the announcements have big implications for SEO, which will make thousands of businesses around the world wary about their efforts to scale SERPs.
This time around, Google has publicly discussed two new updates which offer a major shake-up to the standard Penguin or Panda upgrade. One is a new algorithm called RankBrain, which boasts machine learning capabilities, and the other is a slightly disconcerting real-time Penguin update. For the latter, it essentially means it’s time for businesses to be at the peak of their game with their SEO practices.
When not frightening businesses with a continuous SEO ranking update, Google is nearing completion of an extraordinary project which would bring the Internet to over 100 million people around Indonesia. For businesses, however, the big news is Google’s latest updates–here’s what’s known so far....
Rolling out now, the latest Google Photos update helps you find your photos faster with a new search bar. Start searching in one tap, or scroll down after tapping on the search bar to see faces, places, and photo types from your library.
In addition, Google Photos now offers the ability to customize automatically created movies with your own music, photos, and videos, so it’s easier than ever to make the perfect video after a holiday or trip. It’s also perfect for Mother’s Day – which you knew was coming up on May 8, right?
Finally, it’s now possible to rename or delete device folders you’ve created and manage your photos on SD cards by adding a new folder, copying, and moving photos.
These changes make Google Photos faster and easier to use than ever, and will be coming soon to iOS.
If you are a Google Chrome user, there is good news for you. Your web browser is about to get faster and better than ever, all thanks to a new data compression algorithm that Google is planning to roll out soon.
Google employee Ilya Grigorik took to Google+ to describe the advent of Brotli compression algorithm. This new algorithm will replace the existing one, which is called Zopfli. Brotli was announced last year in September, and according to Google's internal benchmarks, it works faster than all existing data compression algorithms, and can compress data by 17-25% extra, as compared to Zopfli. Furthermore, its compression ratio is almost 25% better than all other data compression algorithms....
If you’re like me, you probably use Google many times a day. But chances are, unless you're a technology geek, you probably still use Google in its simplest form. If your current use of Google is limited to typing in a few words and changing your query until you find what you’re looking for, then I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way -- and it’s not hard to learn.
On the other hand, even if you are a technology geek and can use Google like the best of them already, I still suggest you bookmark this article of advanced Google search tips. Then, you’ll then have the tips on hand when you're ready to pull your hair out in frustration watching a neophyte repeatedly type in basic queries in a desperate attempt to find something.
The following advanced Google search tips are based on my own experience and things that I actually find useful. I’ve kept the descriptions of the search tips intentionally terse, as you’re likely to grasp most of these simply by looking at the example from Google anyway.
Google was born as a company that did Internet search. Over time, it has broadened its interests into everything from drones to pharmaceuticals to venture capital.
Now Google is changing its corporate structure to reflect that it has essentially become a holding company with a disparate collection of businesses.
Larry Page, co-founder and chief executive of Google, said in a blog post on Monday that he was creating a new company named Alphabet that he would run along with Sergey Brin, the other co-founder of Google.
Alphabet is to act as a parent entity, with several other companies operating under the structure. The biggest among them would be Google. In addition, Alphabet is to house other businesses such as Nest, the smart thermostat maker, and Calico, a company focused on longevity, among others....
More so than any other company in the tech space, Google has a tendency to work on many projects out in the open, allowing users to access things that are still in development and provide feedback. As open as Google is, it’s also quite scattered, constantly launching new and interesting things that are either missed or forgotten by users because there’s just so much going on.
In this post, we’re going to show you 10 amazing Google projects that you probably either never knew about or have completely forgotten about....
In two recent posts, I asked what Google could do for news — and vice versa. Now I’ll pose the question about Facebook.
The core of the problem and the opportunity is similar for both: Google and Facebook know more about publishers’ readers than they do. Both services also know more about publishers’ content than they do. So now I’ll ask: Is there a way to share some of that information — or to use the scare word, data — to the benefit of all three parties involved: first the user, then the services and the news organizations?
Google is under pressure especially in Europe, starting with German publishers, then the French, and lately the Spanish, each using their political clout to box the giant in — and it’s working. Google is now in a mood to make friends with the news business and that’s why I wrote those posts, to suggest what I thought could lead to the beginning of a meaningful friendship....
Google+ is a social network "adrift at sea," representing a big missed opportunity for the company, a former Google employee who worked on the service says.
Chris Messina, who worked on Google+ user experience design before leaving the company over a year ago, wrote a long post on Medium, in which he criticizes the service for not delivering on its initial vision of empowering users with the vast amount of data that Google collects about them.
He also calls out Google+ for not having any meaningful differentiators over its more successful competitor, Facebook. "Most people would likely describe Google+ as a newsfeed, a kind of Facebook-lite," he wrote....
Google tips and tricks presentation by Tom D'Amico to educators on Nov. 6, 2014 at BIT14 (ECOO) in Niagara Falls, Ontario..
Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)
Google isn't the only game in town and isn't even the best alternative for many specific search tasks and needs. Here's how to escape Google's grip with Bing, Blekko, BuzzSumo, DuckDuckGo, SocialMention, Quantcast, Topsy, Wolfram|Alpha, and more.
As concerns over the de facto monopoly status of Google continue to grow, I'm reminded of the great philosopher Herman Cain and his infamous line "blame yourself". As long as "Google" is a generic phrase for Internet search, their dominant position is assured. That said, you can do something about it.There are plenty of Google alternatives and many of these players offer a bettersearch experience, depending on your needs. Here are 12 alternatives to escape your reliance on Google for all things search...
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Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but creating art for which some people will pay serious money.