This year googlegle celebrated its 20 year milestone. Now it seems to be looking forward to the next 20 in the form of Google Search. “As Google marks our 20th anniversary, I wanted to share a first look at the next chapter of Search, and how we’re working to make information more accessible and useful for people everywhere,” says the company’s Search, News and Assistant Vice President, Ben Gomes in a blog post. According to him, there are three core shifts to what comes next. More than an answer Google won’t just provide you with answers for what you search anymore, but also...
Google Science Fair is open for submissions until 12 December 2018 for those between 13 and 18 years of age. The competition, which first took place in 2011, has been a place for global learners to share and develop their science initiatives, and possibly win exclusive prizes from Google and sponsors alike. The possibilities for African entrants are tangible too. The last grand prize winner, Kiara Nirghin, was born in South Africa. In a blog post about fair’s commencement, Google interviewed Nirghin, who designed a way to help alleviate the effect of drought on crops using fruit waste as water retaining polymers. Her...
Google Maps has become an essential for many commuters. The navigation tool has guided us through our daily travels, on both new and warn out routes, playing co-pilot wherever we go. Maps however, isn’t just a way to get from A to B anymore. In fact, the tool has evolved into much more, and is actually a pretty cool way to feed your inner explorer -- literally. This week Google outlined these new social features for Google Maps that are geared towards travellers and food lovers. Discover the bites around you Google Maps can suggest places for you to visit based on your...
Google's graveyard is about to get bigger by one more service. Following in the vein of Reader, Wave and Picasa, Google's Inbox email app will be killed off from March 2019, the company announced on Wednesday. Inbox, which debuted in 2014, is a radical redesign of Google's more tradition email management app Gmail. In an article covering its launch, we called it "a cross-breed between Facebook’s News Feed and Google Now, with highlights of your travel itineraries, pictures and the works; all looking colourful."Goo But from 2019, users will either have to find a new email management app, or use Gmail. This Google...
Google Chrome is officially celebrating its 10th birthday. To commemorate the milestone, Google is releasing a brand new updated version of the browser. Chrome usually receives updates in six week cycles but for its 10th birthday, it’s a "bigger than normal" one. The announcement outlined four new features that are on its way to the browser: Overhauled UI A new look Chrome, which will be visible on multiple devices, employs "more rounded shapes, new icons and a new colour palette". These aesthetics have apparently been put into place for simplicity as well as to improve productivity. "We changed the shape of our tabs so that...
Google Searches for South Africa has spiked after Fox News ran a segment, anchored by Tucker Carlson, addressing the country's land expropriation debate. The spike also comes after US President Donald Trump tweeted that Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, will investigate the issue more closely. (Read a full report on Trump's comments and reaction here). And while Twitter users have used all 280 characters to air their views, there is another way we can gauge internet sentiment: Google Trends. Looking at specific queries punched into Google's search bar, we can evaluate just how SA is perceived within the United States. And...
With Google’s recent launch of Android 9 comes Emoji 11.0 and a bunch of new, expressive and politically correct, emojis for users. Though the entire list is 157 new characters long, here are some of our honourable mentions. The Hot Face This emoji looks like it just ran a marathon it didn’t train for, and is so relatable to everyday life. I can imagine it being used to describe anything from a terribly hot day, to disappointing food and even just the general fatigue of daily life we all suffer from. The Pleading Face Admittedly the so called pleading face looks more like the face...
Google has likely offended scores of flatearthers this past week after the company added a new update to Maps that displays planet Earth as a globe. Previously the app displayed the planet much like a massive map on its Maps interface. Now, when users zoom out, they'll be greeted by a bulbous ball in space. Why the change? For Google, it believes that it's a better way to represent relative sizes of countries and continents. While Greenland may look the same size as Africa on a flat map, on a globe, its much smaller. Thank you for showing the real size of Africa....
Google Assistant is this week receiving a new lick of paint from one of Google's older services. "This week, we’re rolling out a new visual overview of your day when you open the Google Assistant app on your phone, with proactive suggestions and personalized information to help you stay on top of your day," the company's Deniz Binay writes in a release. Notably, the tweak to the virtual voice assistant has hints of the original Google Now app -- the company's now defunct dashboard that displayed information snapshots. "The new visual snapshot provides curated, helpful information based on the time of day,...
So... my World Cup predictions are out the window. France will play Croatia in the final after the teams beat Belgium and England respectively. The latter was quite the cracker, with Croatia scoring just a few minutes into the second half of extra time. England simply had no reply. But what the win also gave Croatia is the largest search spike on Google than any of the other semi-final teams this past week. We look at this, and more search anomalies, in the below piece. Croatia sees biggest search spike after England triumph Within the week of the semi-finals, Croatia saw the largest global...
After Google announced plans to sprinkle its Play Music offering into YouTube's video cauldron to create YouTube Music, you'd think the company would continue the trend of rolling similar apps into singular entities. But you'd be mistaken. On Tuesday the company announced Google Podcasts, its app for Android phones and lovers of pods. It's a standalone app but uses the Google app's host of permissions. So if you're already letting Google Assistant do your bidding on a daily basis, you only need allow the app access to "Storage" to download episodes. Notably, you can also request Assistant to continue an episode you started...
If you pay for Google Drive storage, take note. The company this week announced "a simple plan for expanded storage that includes extra benefits" dubbed Google One. Coming to all paying customers of Google's cloud storage service, Google One sees an upgraded offering from 100GB to 30TB if you really, really have a lot of cat pictures to store. This however plays into Google's new family sharing scheme, allowing up to five members to use the wad of storage under a single account. And said family members will also be given a private slice of that storage pie too. Google One will...
Google Assistant, the company's rival to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, is being crammed into almost every Google product this year. The company announced big plans for Assistant at its I/O developers conference this week, and we're here to summarise it all for you into 11 tweetable bylines. Are you ready? Have at it. Google Assistant will be available in six new voices from today, with John Legend lending his rasp to the digital butler later this year too. "Continued Conversations" will allow users to converse with Assistant more fluently, negating the need for "Hey Google" to be uttered before every...
While you were transfixed on Google's swanky new Gmail redesign, news emerged that it may pull the plug on another service. According to Droid Life's "reliable source", Google Play Music -- the company's music streaming service competing against the likes of Apple Music and Spotify -- will be canned, in favour of a service dubbed YouTube Remix. Users currently on Play Music will also be herded onto Remix as early as 2019. It's not a new rumour though. There's been plenty of talk about Google's plans to mash its Play Music offering with YouTube. In December 2017, the company was reportedly set...
All the hype surrounding Gmail may be thanks to its first redesign in some seven years, but not all is well with Google's mail service. According to a number of reports, Gmail users on Sunday found a number of spam messages sent from their accounts. "My email account has sent out 3 spam emails in the past hour to a list of about 10 addresses that I don’t recongnize," wrote one user on Google's Product forum. Changing passwords didn't help this particular user either, nor did marking the mails as spam. "Please help, what else can I do to ensure my account...
South Africa fumes online after girl was raped in Dros restaurant toilet
Julius Malema will let JSomething keep his land in an EFF-led South Africa
Dros Silverton bombarded by negative reviews after child rape
Video: Hey Cape Town, it’s officially snowing on Table Mountain right now
SA government asks Twitter users to stop sharing videos of Dros rape
Cyril Ramaphosa’s stimulus package gets social media talking
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