Facebook is once again the second largest video site in the U.S., according to ComScore. The social network saw 53 million unique video viewers in July. That’s about a third of Google’s audience, but higher than the number of unique … Continue reading →
Google just announced that, starting next week, its search algorithm will start taking a new signal into account: the number of valid copyright removal notices it receives for a given site. According to Google, “this ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” The idea here is obviously to punish pirate sites by pushing links to them down on Google’s search results pages and to appease copyright holders who often claim that Google doesn’t do enough to remove links to copyrighted material.
What does it mean to be bold? To be better than you were the day before? Google’s BOLD Internship is an 11-week internship designed to provide exposure into the technology industry for students who are historically under-represented in this field. However, the program isn’t just about work experience, it’s about growing as a person and befriending some of the coolest people you’ll ever get to meet at the same time.
My journey to BOLD was a product of circumstance. As a freshman in college, I was looking for something meaningful to do in the summer and I came across the inaugural Google BOLD Immersion program. As an 18 year-old, the tech world was virtually unknown to me. I did know however, that any opportunity with Google, is an awesome one. Even though I was intimidated by the odds, I gave it a shot anyways and applied.
Google today agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charge that it bypassed Safari’s privacy settings to serve targeted ads to consumers. Google placed these cookies on Safari users’ computers, despite the fact that, as the FTC notes, “Google had previously told these users they would automatically be opted out of such tracking, as a result of the default settings of the Safari browser used in Macs, iPhones and iPads.” This, according to the FTC, was in direct violation of the earlier privacy settlement between Google and the FTC.
Flash doesn’t get a lot of love these days, but it’s still ubiquitous on the web. To make displaying Flash content safer for its users, Google just announced that it is now putting the Flash Player plug-in it ships with Chrome for Windows (including the aging Windows XP) inside a new and enhanced sandbox “that’s as strong as Chrome’s native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything else available.” Besides the security advantages, Google also stresses that this change will reduce Flash crashes by about 20%.
Hey, here are some personalized search results that I might actually like.
Google has been expanding its Universal Search feature for a while, adding images, news stories, and more to its search results. Today it announced that it’s starting a field trial that will experiment with adding your personal Gmail results as well.
Google just announced two updates coming tomorrow to the Knowledge Graph feature that it launched in May.
The Knowledge Graph is the summary that now appears to the right of the results for US searchers. This allows users to see factual summaries related to their search queries (biographies of notable figures, tour dates for musicians, the cast of movies, etc.) and disambiguate their searches (focus their search on Rio the movie, Rio the casino, or Rio de Janeiro the city). Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal says that since launching the Knowledge Graph, Google has been “able to get users to get users to the right query much faster,” adding that “whenever people are able to get to their results faster … they search more.”
PLUMgrid has raised $10.7 million in Series A funding from Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners to build an operating system that serves the network as much as the modern x86 processor is the foundation for the compute power we use every day to run our applications.
The network is becoming a sort of holy grail. We’ve figured out the compute. You can buy a cheap box and with an x86 processor turn it into a database or web server. It’s with these cheap boxes that Google built its empire. The entire infrastructure relies on these commodity servers that run with its own software, a secret sauce of software that Google will never reveal. It’s their example that has led to a new breed of customers such as Facebook that decided to build the infrastructure themselves.
Oh, this is going to get juicy real quick.
Judge William Alsup is demanding the names of any writers who have a paid relationship with Oracle or Google.
The demand came today in the ongoing lawsuit between the two companies in their dispute over the Android OS.
Google just launched live traffic info for Bogota (Colombia), San Jose (Costa Rica) and Panama City (Panama). In addition, Google is also bringing its real-time traffic data to 130 smaller cities in the U.S., including Kalamazoo (Michigan), Portland (Maine) and Tuscaloosa (Alabama). For the most part, this feature relies on data Google gets from Google Maps and Google Navigation users who share location data with the company. As Android becomes more popular and as more users use their phones for directions as they are driving, Google obviously gets more data. Thanks to this, it can now show live traffic for side roads and arterial roads that don’t typically see as much traffic as a highway or major urban area, for example.
