Tag Archives: Google

News

Tech Tip – Upload An Image To Google To Aid A Search

Google’s Image Search allows you upload an image (or paste in the URL) to identify what a product is and where it can be found on the Web. This could be very useful when searching for Christmas presents. Here’s how it works.

– Go to Google and click on ‘Images’ (top right).

– Click on the camera icon (right hand side of the search box).

– Upload a photo, e.g. of an item of clothing you like the look of but don’t know where to find it.

– Google will use its ‘Lens’ feature to display the exact image or something close to it with a link to click through to website where it can be found.

– It is also possible to add keywords to the search to help get the closest match.

News

Tech Tip – Find Images With Transparent Backgrounds In Google

If you need to quickly find images on any subject which already have a transparent background, there’s a quick and easy way to do it with Google’s Image Search. Here’s how:

– Go to Google and click on ‘Images’ (top right) for Image Search.

– Type in what you’re looking for, e.g. Christmas, and hit return or click on the search symbol.

– Click on ‘Tools’ (top, right-hand-side and below the search box).

– In the ‘Colour’ dropdown, select ‘Transparent’.

– You will then see all the images related to your search term that have a transparent background.

News

Tech Tip – Stop Password Risk From Google’s Enhanced Spellcheck

It’s been reported that if you have Google’s Enhanced Spellcheck enabled, it could be sending everything you type to Google’s servers, including passwords. Here’s how to stop that from happening:

– To check if you have enabled Google’s ‘Enhanced spell check’ copy and paste chrome://settings/?search=Enhanced+Spell+Check into the Chrome address bar (the omnibox).

– If ‘Basic spell check’ is selected, this is OK because it checks spelling without sending data to Google’s servers.

– If ‘Enhanced spell check’ is selected, unselect it and select ‘Basic spell check’ instead.

– For no spell checking at all, turn off the top-right slider.

News

Tech News : Google To Run Fake News Information Adverts

Following an experiment by Bristol and Cambridge Universities, Google has announced that it plans to run adverts on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, educating users about how to spot disinformation and misinformation.

‘Pre-Bunking’ Experiment 

The University experiment which led to Google’s decision to run adverts was based on the idea of ‘pre-bunking’ from ‘Inoculation Theory.’

Inoculation Theory suggests that using various forms of communication, people can be persuaded not to be influenced by other arguments or belief systems. Pre-bunking / attitudinal inoculation, which is based upon Inoculation Theory is the idea that giving web users a small dose of what online manipulation and disinformation looks like will help them to spot it and protect themselves from it in the future.

The Experiment 

The experiment involved Google Jigsaw (a part of Google which “explores threats to open societies”) showing 90 second video adverts on YouTube to 5.4 million people. The adverts informed viewers about the misinformation tactics they may encounter on the platform. 22,000 subjects were then surveyed after seeing the videos.

The Results 

The results showed that respondents’ ability to spot disinformation techniques to decide whether to share content had increased, and that they had an increased ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content. Also, it was found that the ‘inoculation’ effect of the videos worked for people with different levels of education, different political views, and different personality types. It was, therefore, concluded that this type of general inoculation could be scaled and could work well against misinformation online.

Concerns 

Although Google plans to go ahead with the adverts, based on the success of the experiment, concerns raised by some tech commentators include:

– Concerns about impartiality, i.e. who decides what the misinformation (incorrect information) and disinformation (deliberately deceptive information) is, whether it is Google, a government, or another influence. Also, pre-bunking can be used for the wrong reasons, e.g. manipulation by certain regimes.

– The recent apparent failure in the US of pre-bunking over the reason for a video being produced by Russia (which never materialised) in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Pre-bunking also proved to be not entirely successful in stopping fake news about COVID 19.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Many people (particularly younger age groups) tend to get their news from sources such as social media which tend to be less trusted in terms of factual accuracy and motivations. Social media platforms, however, have found it difficult to stop and remove fake news, hate speech, and other damaging elements from their channels. State-sponsored attempts to influence opinions in recent years, e.g. the US election and UK Brexit referendum plus widescale spreading of misinformation and disinformation about COVID 19, have all shown that this is a real problem online. Poor relationships between the west and Russia and China in recent times, plus Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have also made the risk of fake news and deepfakes being circulated even greater. Although pre-bunking may not have been entirely successful in other cases recently, the results of the recent experiments could indicate that pre-bunking adverts may be one useful tool and tactic among many for tackling misinformation and disinformation online. There will, however, be some people who will view it with suspicion, so it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, although this may be difficult to measure.

News

Tech News : Google Improves ‘Quoted Search’

Google has made it easier to do quoted searches by adding snippets to search results to help users save time in locating a phrase in a web page.

Quoted Searches 

Quoted Searches are searches where the search term is placed within quotation marks to find an exact match in the search engine results. However, although Google Search returns pages with the exact term therein, up until now it has been the case that users have to then search within that page to find whereabouts the exact term is located. Google’s explanation for this is that quoted material can appear in areas of a document that don’t lend themselves to creating helpful snippets, e.g. a word or phrase might appear within the menu item of a page.

Snippets To Show Where Exact Term Appears 

Google’s new change to quoted searches means that snippets will be displayed in the search results which show exactly where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document, thereby saving users time. For example, if a user searches for [“google search”], the snippet will show where that exact phrase appears. Google also says that on desktop, the quoted material will be shown in bold.

Other Information About Quoted Searches 

Although quoted searches have been improved, Google has offered some tips and caveats to accompany its announcement of the change. For example:

– Quoted search results may still match content not readily visible on a page, e.g. a meta description tag, ALT text that describes images, or material brought in through inline frames. Google says in these circumstances, users can try using a standard Find command in a browser or search from within Developer Tools to help find where the exact match phrase occurs.

– Where pages may have changed since Google last visited them, and the exact phrase no longer exists on the current page, users could try looking at the Google cached copy to see where the quoted content appeared on the previous version of the page.

– Quoted terms won’t appear in web page snippets if they only appear within title links or URLs of a web page.

– Google says that although punctuation is sometimes seen as spaces by its system, it will be able to match content where punctuation like commas or hyphens break up words, e.g. don’t, doesn’t, don’t / doesn’t, or don’t – doesn’t.

– If a search involves multiple quoted terms, the snippet may not show all of them if they are far apart from each other.

– Google will mainly show in bold quoted content for web page snippets on desktop.

– Quoted searches don’t work for local results.

– Using quotes may be a useful tool for “power users”, but Google will look for both the exact words and phrases by default anyway.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

After making the news for a couple of less than positive issues lately (i.e. the Google engineer who said that Google’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient which resulted in his sacking, plus news of a delay in banning third-party cookies), this is a bit of good news, particularly for “power users” of Search. This is essentially a long overdue improvement to one aspect of the search engine results and is timely, considering mobile device users may find it particularly awkward to search whole web pages easily for a phrase. Businesses may also be pleased to know that this is not a ranking change, i.e. it won’t affect ranking position of pages. However, the change may have an impact on click through rate, depending on how the snippets help a user decide how relevant a page could be to their query.

News

Tech News : Google Sacks Engineer Who Said AI Chatbot Was Sentient

Google has sacked senior software engineer Blake Lemoine, who made the news after saying that Google’s LaMDA chatbot’s responses to questions showed that it was a sentient being.

What Happened? 

Back in June, Google engineer Blake Lemoine reported that the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA ) AI system bot may have feelings and was saying things that a sentient being would be expected to say. Giving examples, Mr Lemoine reported that after asking if it was true that the AI bot was a sentient being, the bot replied “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”  

Among other similar comments, the bot is also reported as saying that “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” 

Mr Lemoine requested that Google recognise the needs of the bot, treat it as an employee of the company, and ask for its consent before using it in experiments.

Unfortunately for Mr Lemoine, who has been with Google for 7 years, Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc disagreed with his assessment of the chatbot and described his comments as “wholly unfounded”. Mr Lemoine was then placed on paid leave for violating company policies.

Dismissed 

It has been reported that Alphabet Inc has now sacked Mr Lemoine. Reuters, for example, has reported a quote from an email sent to them by a “Google spokesperson” which said, “It’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information.”

It has been reported that Mr Lemoine is considering starting his own AI company.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

In addition to being a story about AI’s development and how, as Google says, its chat-bot has got to the stage that it can “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics”, this is also about how, in a prominent tech-business where product secrecy is important, there are clear policies in place. In this case, Mr Lemoine’s online comments were seen as violating data security policies. Some commentators would also say that the story could have caused some embarrassment and potential reputational damage to Google, which is unlikely to have helped Mr Lemoine. It is widely accepted that although AI bots have come a long way and have shown their value as a time and human resource-saving tool with efficiency and productivity advantages for businesses, e.g. in customer service, they are still an exceptionally long way from being anywhere near ‘sentient.’ The story does, however, hold a positive note for businesses in showing how bots which they may deploy could engage with customers in a way that is free-flowing and natural, which could be reassuring and helpful, thereby adding value to the business and creating good customer experiences.

News

Tech News : Google Offers Job Interview ‘Warmup’ Tool

The new AI-based interview Warmup tool from Google uses questions from a series of industry experts to help users prepare for job interviews.

Tech Jobs And Skills Gap 

Googe says that this news Interview Warmup tool was developed as part of its own Google Career Certificates programme which offers professional-level online training. The programme was designed to address the problem, as identified by Burning Glass’ Labor Insight, that there are 1.5 million tech job vacancies in the U.S. These jobs are in fast-growing fields like data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management and UX design. The Interview Warmup tool is, therefore, an add-on to the training that could provide vital help for those whose tech job applications have reached the interview stage.

Even though it was developed for Google Career Certificates, the Interview Warmup tool is open to everyone.

How It Works 

Built in collaboration with job seekers, the Interview Warmup tool lets users practice answering questions selected by industry experts and uses machine learning to transcribe the answers in real time to help the user to discover ways to improve their interview technique.

Google says: “You’ll also see insights: patterns detected by machine learning that can help you discover things about your answers, like the job-related terms you use and the words you say most often. It can even highlight the different talking points you cover in each answer, so you can see how much time you spend talking about areas like your experience, skills and goals.” 

UK Tech Skills Gap 

Here in the UK, government figures showed that there were 1.2 million job vacancies in the three months to November 2021 and that around 82 per cent of all jobs in the UK list digital skills as a requirement. There’s been a tech skills gap in the UK for many years now which has particularly affected SME’s and, at the same time, new tech industries have been growing, e.g. AI. Back in 2020 the government launched The Skills Toolkit offering free, high-quality digital and numeracy courses. Also, the government’s ‘Levelling Up’ white paper promised that by 2030, the number of people successfully completing high-quality skills training will have increased in every region of the country.

Skill In Itself 

Although learning the skills for a job are essential, knowing how to come across well in interview is a skill in itself and could provide the competitive advantage that’s vital to gaining employment. It is in this crucial last stage that Google’s new Interview Warmup tool could be of real benefit.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Finding staff with the digital skills that are so important in today’s business environment can be a real challenge, particularly for SMEs. Interviewing provides the opportunity to examine candidates in much more detail and it would be great shame if technically qualified and competent candidates who may well be suited the job were rejected simply because they were less effective in interview situations. The Interview Warmup tool, therefore, has a value both to candidates wanting practice and hone their interview skills, and ultimately for the businesses that need to uncover the relevant information from interview candidates that could lead to employing someone who provides real benefit to the business going forward.

News

Tech News : Google Changes Stance Over Legacy G Suite Account

Google has offered new alternative options to free Legacy G Suite account holders who it had previously said would have to upgrade to a paid subscription by 1 July.

What Is A Legacy G Suite Account?

Google’s free edition of G Suite, known as Workspace, was first made available to businesses, organisations, and schools from 2006 to December 6, 2012, with Google Apps. Users of this free edition of G Suite—also known as the legacy free edition could host Google accounts on custom domains for multiple users. However, this free version gave users a much-reduced set of business features.

Move To Paid Subscription

Recently however, Google informed users, who had been allowed to keep their free accounts for 10 years, that they needed to either upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription service to keep their services by July 1, 2022, or export their data using Google’s Takeout tool.

Backtrack – New Option

Last week, however, Google emailed users with details of a new option (also now shown on Google’s Support pages). The main new alternative is that users who don’t want to upgrade to a paid subscription will be offered a better data transfer option “in the coming months.” This new option will enable users to move their non-Google Workspace paid content and most of their data to a no-cost option. The new option won’t include premium features like custom email or multi-account management, and users will be able to evaluate the option prior to July 1, 2022, and prior to account suspension.

Another Lifeline

Google also appears to be offering another lifeline to those who have a G Suite legacy free edition account that’s purely for personal use and who don’t want to upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription. Google has invited these account holders (with ten users or less) to use a feedback form to provide more information. Google says that if they don’t want to upgrade to Google Workspace, they will still be allowed to keep their access to additional Google services (YouTube, Photos, Maps, Pay, Books etc) and any paid content purchased through non-Google Workspace services made with their legacy account e.g., any movies purchased on Google Play.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It appears Google’s first announcement of a deadline to either start paying by July or export your data out may have ruffled a few feathers and highlighted some of the different needs of Legacy G Suite account holders who may require a bit more help, including the fact that some people have content they’ve purchased through Google that they don’t want to lose. Although Legacy G Suite account holders are likely to appreciate that they enjoyed 10 years for free, they may also have assumed that Google would continue to take the same generous approach when the time for change approached rather than essentially being emailed with a deadline. For Google, it’s at least been a way to get the attention of account holders and help funnel users towards Google’s aim of ramping up its ‘Workspace’ to create something that Google hopes will seriously challenge Microsoft’s Office/365 dominance.

News

Tech Tip – Organise Your Chrome Bookmarks With Folders

If you’d like an easy way to organise all your Google Chrome browser bookmarks, try putting them in folders.  Here’s how:

To create a bookmark folder:

– On your computer, open Chrome.

– Top right, click on the 3 dots, then ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘Bookmark manager’.

– Top right, click on the 3 dots and ‘Add new folder’.

OR

– If you use the bookmarks bar, right-click the bookmarks bar and click on ‘Add Folder’.

To add your bookmarks to the folders:

– Top right, click on the 3 dots, then ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘Bookmark manager’.

– Drag a bookmark up or down or drag a bookmark into a folder on the left. Also, you can copy and paste bookmarks in the order you want.

– If you use the bookmarks bar, you can drag your bookmarks into the order you want.

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Tech Tip – Using Google To Search Within A Website

If you’d like to quickly search within a whole website (e.g. a competitor’s website for specific term or subject) here’s a quick way to do so using Google.

– Go to Google.

– In the search field, type “site:” followed by the URL of the site and your search terms. For example: site:bbc.co.uk Christmas

– This should return all pages (and many images) in the website that feature the search term you’ve specified.