Facebook may be having a very bad week stateside and in the UK over its Cambridge Analytica data scandal, but over in the continental European Union officials are maintaining that fellow tech giant Google may ultimately need to be broken up, lest it swallow the internet whole.
Google has now been complying with the European Union’s controversial “right to be forgotten” laws, which the European Court of Justice first ruled applied to search engines in 2014, for three years. On Monday, the search giant released an updated version of its annual Transparency Report, which discloses how many and…
Paranoid conservatives have increasingly become certain Google is trying to silence them, citing its firing of engineers who allegedly created hostile work environments and a largely illusory panic about YouTube censorship. Now, according to Tucker Carlson’s flagship site the Daily Caller, they’re worried Google’s new…
As authorities named Devin Patrick Kelley as the shooter in a horrifying massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas which resulted in at least 26 deaths on Sunday, Google once again served up misinformation and posts from conspiracy theorists at the top of search results for his name.
Microsoft claims Bing, its search engine for people who have just unboxed a new computer and are trying to find out where to download Chrome, is bigger than you think.
Following the laws of individual nations becomes a hell of a conundrum when your business fundamentally has no borders. But recent court cases are threatening to make the situation even more difficult by demanding that a country’s laws be honored by companies like Google all around the world. On Wednesday, an ongoing…
Using search data collected by Google, researchers at the Pew Research Center have reconstructed the journeys taken by refugees flowing into Europe from the Middle East. It represents a new way of tracking migration patterns—but the technique could eventually lead to misuse.
Google is pretty much everywhere. It’s in your smartphone, car, and maybe even your watch— but there’s still nothing like searching Google on a desktop computer. To this day, about 64 percent of US web surfers use Google as their primary search engine.
A neat search engine from photo sharing company 500px uses sketches to help you find the photos you’re looking for—and, luckily, it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw for shit.
Remember Frinkiac, the amazing database that lets you search for thousands of iconic Simpsons quotes for the perfect screencap? And then let you gif them, rendering the need for actual language in internet communication null and void? Well, now it has a Futurama-flavored sibling. With blackjack and hookers!
There’s a still—and a matching quote—from The Simpsons to fit pretty much every occasion in human history. Finding the perfect one, however, just got incredibly easy with the public release of Frinkiac, which trawls through millions of images to match whatever Simpsons quote you put in.
Europe’s “right to be forgotten” rules have been around for a while, but they pretty much just applied to Europeans who wanted to hide embarrassing or incorrect content about them. Now a French court says that Google needs to go a step further and apply the rules to all of its domains.
It was exhilarating to be back in the game again, a 20-year-old college dropout with stock options, working at the center of the internet revolution. But I was overwhelmed. I’d only ever worked on a team with a half-dozen people, and Lycos was a huge company with hundreds of employees. All the developers seemed much…
Google wants to be better at Googling Google. The company is hiring an SEO program manager so Google sites get Googled better. What a world!
Google is the most popular search engine in the world, to the point where I feel dumb typing “Google is the most popular search engine in the world” because holy shit, you already know. But ubiquity is not synonymous with benevolence. The EU’s new lawsuit against the search giant brings up larger issues.
Exactly one year ago, DARPA announced a characteristically scifi-inspired mission: to create a search engine that could find things on the deep web that Google's crawlers would miss. The so-called Memex project is now well underway, and for the first time we're getting a look at the crime-fighting search engine in…
Google just added a new Suggested Stories feature to its news search results, so you can let the search engine pull up a customized selection of stories to read about based on whatever terrifyingly dense accumulation of personal data Google has on you by now.
Remember how excited everyone was about Google Flu Trends last year when it confirmed all of our deepest and darkest fears that we were doomed to a winter of misery? Apparently, using peoples' neurotic self-diagnoses isn't the most accurate way to track disease. So now, Google has decided to introduce a "new"…
The Bing search engine will now give you results if you use emojis instead of words in your search query.
Searching for porn on the internet just got easier (not that it was hard before).