Articles about Google

Despite the fact that Google has a vested interest in online advertising, the company is about to enable its own built-in ad blocker (of sorts) in Chrome. Starting tomorrow, 15 February, the Chrome browser across all platforms will feature ad filtering to cut out those advertisements that fail to comply with the Better Ads Standards.

This is something that Google has talked about before, but ahead of the ribbon-cutting, the company has revealed how the feature works and what it means for Chrome users. The first thing to note is that it does not mean you should ditch your current ad blocker.

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Google has high hopes for the Pixel line. Its smartphones compete against the best the market has to offer, featuring cutting-edge hardware, vanilla Android and, unlike many of its droid-toting siblings, three years of support. But consumers aren't (yet) enamored with them.

According to IDC, Google shipped 3.9 million Pixel smartphones last year, which is not a whole lot when you consider just how many tens of million of units the big players ship in a single quarter.

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Google has launched a developer preview of AMP for Email, bringing its Accelerated Mobile Pages feature to Gmail. The aim is modernize email, allowing for the creation of messages with interactive, dynamic content.

In practice what this means is that emails could be updated with new information if details change, and that it will be possible to fill out forms and so on without leaving your inbox. There are already a number of big names getting involved -- including Pinterest and Booking.com -- and more will use the open source tool.

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Learning can be fun. Actually, scratch that -- learning should be fun. If a child or adult is bored while studying or being taught a new lesson, something is wrong. True, not all subjects are interesting to all students, so that is why it is imperative to match students with topics that truly interest them. In other words, it can be better to focus on strengths rather than weaknesses.

If a college student is interested in coding, for instance, there is no shortage of curriculums to support that -- depending on the university, of course. The thing is, you can only learn so much from books and lectures. Like anything in life, hands-on experience can trump everything. That's why Google's "Summer of Code" program is so important. If you aren't familiar, it gives university students the opportunity to work on an established open source project. The mentor organizations that are participating aren't third-rate either. For example, students can work with Kodi, GNOME, and LibreOffice, to name a few.

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The number of people running Oreo may well be very small, but there's already talk about the next version of Android -- Android P. Reports about what has been named internally as Pistachio Ice Cream promise not only a design overhaul, but also iPhone X-style notch support.

The Oreo successor is due for release later this year, and a Bloomberg report shed some light on what we can expect, including tighter Google Assistant integration, support for different phone formats, and improved battery life.

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Uber has agreed to a settlement with Google's self-driving technology unit, Waymo, over claims that that the company stole trade secrets during the acquisition of Otto. Google's parent company, Alphabet, sued Uber a year ago, and now a payment of $245 million has been agreed.

The financial settlement to be received by Waymo includes 0.34 percent of Uber's equity based on a valuation of $72 billion. Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, expressed "regret" about the matter, and said he wanted to correct "mistakes of the past."

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Google is certainly no stranger to accusations of abusing its position to its own advantage, and the company has now been fined 1.36 billion rupees ($21.17 million) by India's antitrust watchdog.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Google was guilty of "search bias" and had been abusing its dominance in online web search and online search advertising. Particular criticism was leveled at Google's promotion of its own flight search page.

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While Firefox has been much better lately, Chrome remains the best overall web browser. Quite frankly, it isn’t a very fair fight, as Google essentially has unlimited resources to innovate. Chrome is fast, feature-full, and very secure. It does a great job of delivering the web to consumers while also helping to keep them safe.

Continuing its trend of protecting Chrome users, Google today makes a big announcement regarding web safety. Starting in July of this year, all HTTP websites will be marked as "not secure." This follows the company marking just some sites this way.

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When Google established Alphabet as a parent company for itself, things got very confusing. The newly established company became obsessed with establishing sub-company names under all letters of the alphabet -- seriously. In other words, Alphabet was taking its namesake way too literally. It felt forced and not at all organic.

Ultimately, it was decided that Nest Labs would be separated from Google, so it could represent the "N" for Alphabet. This has proven to be quite foolish, as it has seemingly slowed Google's innovation in the smart home market. Since then, Amazon has been making huge strides in the smart home segment. Google has apparently had enough of having its lunch eaten by an online bookseller. As of today, the Google and Nest Labs hardware teams are together again.

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The world is currently undergoing a cord cutting revolution. Thanks to the internet, many consumers are being empowered to dump their cable provider and switch to a streaming option. This is sort of ironic, as quite often, the internet being used to stream is provided by the TV provider that is being dumped. Ultimately, the cable company becomes nothing more than an ISP. You know what? Maybe that is how it should be.

Cordcutters have many internet-based TV providers from which to choose these days, but one of the most attractive is offered by Google. The search giant’s YouTube TV service is quite intriguing thanks to its paltry $35 monthly fee (often much less than cable TV). Starting today, the service will become even more popular, as it is now available for Roku and Apple TV.

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The clandestine mining of cryptocurrency is something that we have seen in various forms over the last year or so, in website code and Android apps. A new discovery by security firm Trend Micro shows that hackers have found a way to inject Coinhive mining code into ads that appear on YouTube.

The crypto-jacking technique means that hackers have been able to profit by using other people's CPU time to mine the Monero cryptocurrency while they watch videos. Trend Micro reports that there has been a huge increase in Coinhive web miner detections in recent days, with hackers abusing Google's DoubleClick to distribute the code through big sites including YouTube.

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Using any smartphone means having to work within its storage limitations. The prevalence of cloud services has taken some of the strain off physical storage, but running out of room locally can still be an issue.

To help with this problem, Google offers Files Go. Now the company has updated the app to make it an even more powerful tool for freeing up space. The app can now handle SD cards and tablets, and includes a new option to change file associations.

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Google is a company that's synonymous with advertisements. It makes huge amounts of money from delivering carefully targeted ads, much to the chagrin of those on the receiving end. To make life a little more bearable -- although not ad-free -- the company is making changes to Ads Settings and the Mute This Ad feature.

The changes affect not only the millions of websites that are filled with ads delivered through Google, but also the myriad of apps that are ad-supported. The latest changes make it possible to mute ad reminders, and also increases the level of control users have over ad muting.

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Google has added a new audiobooks section to its Play Store. The announcement was widely expected, as over the weekend imagery came to light suggesting Google had plans to start selling audiobooks -- but no one knew quite how far off it might be.

There's some good news for anyone who has been put off by the likes of Audible in the past -- audiobooks in Google Play are being offered without a subscription. Available in 45 countries and nine languages, Google offers support for Android, iOS and Google Assistant.

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When out and about, you may well find that you use free public Wi-Fi connections. The chances are that you use more than one as you battle to find one that offers a decent speed. With Android 8.1 Oreo, Google has a new feature that will help to make your life easier.

As the company has been talking about for a little while, Oreo now lets you see the speed of a Wi-Fi connection before you decide if you want to connect or not.

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