Google Archive

The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History. If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn Location History on (it’s off by default), soon your Timeline will be saved right on your device — giving you even more control over your data. Just like before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time or disable the setting entirely. If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google. ↫ Marlo McGriff, Director of Product, Google Maps, at Google’s official blog All else being equal, moving location data from residing unencrypted in the cloud to on your device is a good thing. That being said, if Google is giving up access to this data, it most likely means they’ve gotten really good at estimating your whereabouts using other data instead.

It turns out that fancy video Google made to show off its new “AI” was… Well, not “faked”, but definitely a bit staged. Google also admits that the video is edited. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” it states in its YouTube description. This means the time it took for each response was actually longer than in the video. In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice. When asked about the video by Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text,” and they pointed to a site showing how others could interact with Gemini with photos of their hands, or of drawings or other objects. In other words, the voice in the demo was reading out human-made prompts they’d made to Gemini, and showing them still images. That’s quite different from what Google seemed to be suggesting: that a person could have a smooth voice conversation with Gemini as it watched and responded in real time to the world around it. ↫ Parmy Olson for Bloomberg Companies always lie. It’s in their nature.

Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an “artificial” five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with Firefox at all. I’m sure it doesn’t, Google.

With these changes in place, we’ve seen support for Manifest V3 increase significantly among the extension developer community. Specifically, we are encouraged by our ongoing dialogue with the developers of content blocking extensions, who initially felt Manifest V3 could impact their ability to provide users with the features they’ve come to expect. Google has made several changes to Manifest V3 specifically to ease concerns among developers of content blocking extensions, and it seems those changes have been positively received. The maximum number of active rulesets has been increased, as well as the number of dynamic rules, which are rules ad blocker developers can change and update without having to update the extension as a whole. Regardless of these changes, I would still advise everyone to get a Raspberry Pi or whatever and run Pi-Hole – this will block ads for your entire network, and all devices, regardless of browser or operating system.

Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they’ve shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube. The uBO team members are all volunteers. They’ve gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there’s a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. Maybe that’s how YouTube will win this war of attrition. If you use YouTube enough, YouTube Premium is a great deal – albeit it a deal that’s steadily getting worse as Google increases its price.

Google paid $26.3 billion to other companies to ensure its search engine was the default on web browsers and mobile phones, a top company executive testified during the Justice Department’s antitrust trial Friday. The amount of payments Alphabet Inc.’s Google made to other companies for the default status — such as Apple Inc. for placement on the iPhone and other devices — has more than tripled since 2014, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior executive responsible for both search and advertising. Google’s search advertising brought in $146.4 billion in revenue in 2021, a number that has also climbed over the same years, Raghavan said. The payments for the default were the company’s biggest cost, he added. Utterly bananas. Is it any wonder, then, that nobody can compete with Google? How are you supposed to compete as a search engine when Google shells the entire nominal GPD of Bosnia and Herzegovina every year to be the default everywhere where it matters? And that’s 2021 – who knows how much it is now!

The big question coming up is how Google’s focus on AI will impact that core business. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience is still only available on an opt-in basis, so we don’t yet know how much it’ll impact the company’s ad business. Google is already moving to head off that problem. On Google’s earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company would be experimenting with new formats native to the way SGE works — the company has already shown off some ideas — so perhaps we’ll start to see some of those formats debut in the coming weeks and months. Later in the call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler added that “it’s extremely important to us that in this new experience, advertisers still have the opportunity to reach potential customers along their dsearch journeys.” This is not news.

Google cut dozens of jobs in its news division this week, CNBC has learned, downsizing at a particularly sensitive time for online platforms and publishers. An estimated 40 to 45 workers in Google News have lost their jobs, according to an Alphabet Workers Union spokesperson, who didn’t know the exact number. A Google spokesperson confirmed the cuts but didn’t provide a number, and said there are still hundreds of people working on the news product. I’m no expert in personnel management and human resources, but with the state of the world such as it is, it seems like an incredibly inopportune time to decimate your news department, especially when you’re a tech company, who already have an absolutely abysmal track record when it comes to dealing with news and misinformation.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.” He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”. Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google in recent years knows that Suleyman is 100% correct. Google’s search results have become so bad because website makers play the SEO game, and that means creating content that Google’s algorithm likes – but, and here’s the kicker, what Google’s algorithm likes, is not really what people like. Writing an article to please a computer is entirely different from writing an article to please a human. There are very clear and well-understood and thoroughly studied rules about writing in a way that makes things easy to read, but Google’s algorithm doesn’t optimise for that. And now “AI” is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We’re not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. In fact, that future may already be here, judging by some of the style of writing I’ve been seeing even on otherwise venerable outlets. This is also why so many websites have started posting basic, simple how-to articles. You see stuff like “How do I move my apps on an iPhone?” or “How do I delete a folder in Windows?” or “The best neckband headphones of 2023” all over the place now, even on websites where they clearly don’t belong and don’t fit the audience, not just on content farms – these articles are not designed for readers, they’re designed to catch Google search queries and generate traffic. It must be absolutely soul-crushing and mind-numbing to write stuff like that and optimise it for SEO, but you know – fish’ gotta swim, bird’s gotta eat. Here’s a little inside hockey for you: on several occasions over the past year or so, both OSNews as a whole, and me individually, have been approached by serious parties to effectively turn OSNews into one of those content farms. Some have even tried to get me to write such “content” for their own content farms. Clearly, we’ve never accepted such offers – I’m no cheap date – but the pressure is there, and not everyone can resist. It’s why so many tech websites that used to have a clear identity and tone have become so much more bland and repetitive. They are all tiny cogs in massive content networks now, with their original stated goals and interests shoved to the wayside – all to chase the SEO. We’ve clearly not yet fallen victim to this – OSNews is still just me posting news – but that also means we’re not making any money in the ways other tech websites do, and in fact, why we’re not making enough to keep things going without OSNews’ owner footing the bill out of his own pocket. That’s why I’ve been more active and persistent in promoting our Patreon, Ko-Fi, merch store, and Liberapay, since it allows us to not worry about the financials as much. It always feels awkward to do, but I also realise that if I want OSNews to keep going for another 25 years, that’s really the only thing I can do. Because Google has thoroughly ruined every other avenue for websites like ours to make money. I’m so sorry for the headline.

Several years ago, Google introduced Discover as a feature of Google Search on mobile devices. This feature populates content related to a user’s interests, based on their Web and App Activity. The Google Discover feed is displayed under the search box in Google’s mobile apps and on the left-most pane of the Home screens on some Android devices. However, Google has now begun testing the Discover feed on the desktop version of Google.com for a select group of users. The same feed displayed on mobile devices is now appearing below the search box on desktops. The first thing I do whenever I see anything like this is turn it off, run for the hills, or both. Google’s home page has always remained fairly the same over the decades, even though it’s some of the most prime real estate on the web. Seeing them fill it up with useless news stories and related nonsense seems like just another step along the path towards full Yahooification of Google.

I don’t necessarily agree. These new editing tools in smartphones are nothing a semi-decent Photoshop user can’t do in an afternoon, and editing photos is as old as photography itself. All these tools do is further democratise photo editing, and this was always going to happen, smartphones or not. Adding watermarks or other markers is never going to work, since even if it’s entirely unfalsifiable – a big if – the vast majority of people encountering edited photos would not go and look at the metadata or whatever to check of the photo is real or not. If people still fall for obvious bullshit like antivax talking points or flat earth hoaxes, a bunch of technobabble metadata isn’t going to stop them.

Following preliminary objections over Google’s data terms, set out back in January by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the tech giant has agreed to make changes that will give users a better choice over its use of their information, the country’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said today. The commitments cover situations where Google would like to combine personal data from one Google service with personal data from other Google or non-Google sources or cross-use these data in Google services that are provided separately, per the authority. European countries and the EU continue to get shit done when it comes to reigning in big tech.

All Chromebook Plus laptops offer faster processors and double the memory and storage, giving you the power to get more done, easily. All Chromebook Plus laptops also come with a Full HD IPS display — which means you get a full 1080p HD experience when watching streaming content, and crisp, clear viewing for reading, creating content or editing photos and videos. Finally, there’s a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction for smoother, more lifelike video calls. So basically, because the Chromebook market is dominated by cheap crap, Google has had to create a new category of Chromebooks that are slightly less crap, so that buyers who don’t want crap but instead want slightly less crap can distinguish the slightly less crap from the crap so they end up buying the crap they want. Like gaming Chromebooks, I give this like two years before Google sees something shiny and this whole Chromebook Plus thing is dead and gone.

So, what’s in the document that Google didn’t want to get out? The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google’s search advertising “is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created” with economics that only certain “illicit businesses” selling “cigarettes or drugs” “could rival.” Beyond likening Google’s search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak’s notes also said that because users got hooked on Google’s search engine, Google was able to “mostly ignore the demand side” of “fundamental laws of economics” and “only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.” This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ. “We could essentially tear the economics textbook in half,” Roszak’s notes said. Juicy documents from an abusive monopolist are always a fun read.