Search

The internet is a huge place, and while there's a variety of search engines available, it's undeniable that Google is the top player: it handles roughly 77% of web searches around the world. But with that in mind, it's still an impressive feat when an underdog reaches a milestone, especially one with goals different from the entrenched leader. That's the case this week, as the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo hit 30 million direct searches in a single day.

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Today Microsoft Search was introduced - or re-introduced - with an eye on searching everywhere, in all things, at all times. This is Microsoft's biggest effort to take on Google and its all-in integration of services, but with Microsoft's strong points. That means search in Office 365 documents as well as on-machine and on the web. "Getting pages of results with hyperlinks to other information is simply not enough," said Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President for OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office.

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For a lot of people, summer means spending time outside at local events, whether those are concerts, festivals, art shows, or theater. Google has been working on improving event discovery within Search for a while now, but today, it announced a pretty significant update that will put information on events front and center. The idea is to surface information on events right in your search results, saving the trouble of visiting different websites to find the idetails you need.

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Microsoft has updated its Bing mobile apps for iOS and Android with new visual search capabilities. This tool is powered by artificial intelligence, which enables the user to snap an image of an object, then get information about that object through a Bing search. At no point does the user have to input text, helping for those times when you don't have quite the right words to search.

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When you speak about operating system or OS, people with s bit of tech knowledge will probably think of Windows, macOS (or OS X), Android, iOS, and maybe even Linux. For the rest of the world's computer-using population, an "OS" is simply the thing that launches their apps and shows them their documents and photos and takes them to the Internet. It seems that Google, with particular attention to the latter, of course, is trying to move towards that simpler notion of an OS. And it is doing so by replacing everything with a search bar and an always listening AI.

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This week Google's Podcast app was revealed in detail, from audio search to indexing. As it turns out, Google already released their Podcast App in the form of an update to their already-in-play Google Search app. Getting to this Podcast interface is not entirely intuitive - but for a good reason. Google doesn't just want to run over your face with their Podcasting abilities, not when you might want to be searching for other Podcasting apps. That's not what Google is all about.

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Sometimes winning a court case isn't a complete victory, especially if the case wasn't dismissed outright. At the very least, it could set a legal precedent for more of the same cases. Naturally, the chances of that happening increase even more when you lose. That is the situation Google will find itself in soon in Europe after it lost what is considered to be a landmark "right to be forgotten" case in the UK.

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Subscribe with Google was introduced today to bring online newspaper subscriptions into Google's warm embrace. The announcement was made by Google's Jim Albrecht, Project Management Director for Subscribe with Google. "Today we’re announcing Subscribe with Google," said Albrecht, "the simple way to subscribe to news publications and maintain access everywhere: websites, apps, even search results."

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Google may have its own mobile and desktop platforms but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that it doesn’t have a monopoly on those. And while it has indeed made some of its apps and services available on iOS, some of them felt more raw than others. And many felt almost foreign compared to native iOS apps. That changes today for the Google app on iOS. The latest update to Google’s mobile Search app now integrates better into Apple’s platform allowing you to search from anywhere, anytime.

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Google just recently stripped away its View Image button, as well as the Search by Image functionality, and none were too happy about it. While no one will probably deny that it may have been abused, users felt that the search giant bent the knee to a company who may be more concerned about generating page hits than user convenience. Google, however, isn’t exactly innocent on that matter either. Don’t worry, there are ways to bring those features back, though how long they will last is probably a bigger question.

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Google Search has effectively put the world’s information at our fingertips. It is, however, a two-edged sword that may have also made it too easy for people to circumvent certain laws, particularly copyrights and trademarks. Google has always come under fire for that but things came to a head when stock photography website Getty Images lodged a complaint against it in Europe, where Google has a track record of losing. Last week, the two reached a settlement that will see Google change some things in its image search. That starts now with its removal of the “View Image” button in image search results.

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The appetite for news on mobile is increasing, and Google wants to make chewing through it more like Snapchat and less like a chore. The company has revealed its latest project, AMP Stories, taking news content and packaging it into a visual-first format that promises more engagement from attention-short readers.

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