Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war?
Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature.
Plus, Facebook added the ability to poke a friend when you search for them on the social network.
Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month.
Facebook never defined what the idea behind poking was, and left it up to users’ interpretation, with some choosing to use it a way to flirt.
Google today took aim at the SEO industry which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results.
That’s about to change with the company’s latest search update, the comapny said.
On Tuesday, Google announced a search quality update that will specifically focus on improving the search quality ranking of websites and will update Google Search’s spam policies.
Google estimates that through this update and its prior efforts, it will be able to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by 40%.
If Google could address these problems with its search quality update, it could have a significant impact on how consumers perceive the usefulness of Google Search, which many people have become increasingly concerned about in the wake of AI advances.
MyHeritage announced today that it’s launching OldNews.com, a new website that offers access to thousands of historical newspapers, mainly from the 1800s and 1900s.
The website allows genealogists, educators, researchers, and history enthusiasts to search for articles about people and events throughout history.
At launch, the website includes newspapers from publications across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Austria, the Netherlands, and Australia.
“Historical newspapers contain a wealth of information and provide an unparalleled level of detail about the past,” said MyHeritage CEO and founder Gilad Japhet in a press release.
“We are launching OldNews.com to serve as our focal point for historical newspapers, with a robust content offering.
Google is introducing improvements to search suggestions in Chrome, the company announced today.
As part of the changes, users will start to get more helpful search suggestions in Chrome based on what others are searching for, see more images for suggested searches and find search suggestions even with a poor connection.
Search suggestions are the drop-down list of suggested completions that appear before you finish typing out your query in Google.
With these new updates, Google is expanding the availability of search suggestions and using them to boost inspiration.
For example, if you start typing out “bohemian table,” Google will display an image of a bohemian table, bohemian tablecloth, bohemian table runner and bohemian table lamp.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
Google’s proposed “Findings of Fact” filing documents the history of search competition, including Google’s own beginnings, its innovations, the competitive landscape, Google’s search ads business, distribution agreements, and more.
When shareholders sold stock to various VC firms, those funds were not used to improve the search engine, the filing argues.
But it contradicts this point, too, noting that a third of DuckDuckGo’s 50 employees in 2018 were working on improving the search engine, for example.
The search engine receives only about 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S., despite estimates that 10% of people in the U.S. claim to be users.
This, DuckDuckGo’s leadership had explained, is due to the fact that people often use its search engine for some, but not all of their search queries.
The Browser company’s Arc, a browser focused on a less cluttered web experience, launched a new feature in its mobile app Arc Search that uses AI to summarize web pages.
However, in our testing, the AI summaries themselves often miss the mark.
Other users have also pointed out that the summary feature doesn’t work well with other languages.
That said, there is also a problem with AI-powered summary features in other places as well.
Additionally, Arc updated its “Browse for me” AI-powered search to make the pages generated as search results sharable.
The Browser Company launched the Arc’s first iPhone companion app last year, allowing users to save links for consumption on the desktop application later.
The firm has now released a new mobile app, called Arc Search, that aims to focus on the search experience.
type a search query and tap “browse for me” – we'll then go read 6 webpages on your behalf… …and create THE PERFECT TAB to answer your query.
Notably, last week, the Browser Company announced that users can set Preplexity as their default search engine on the Arc’s desktop client.
Arc Search browser also archives tabs after 1 day (this is customizable) to save you from tab overload.
Google announced today that it’s rolling out a few new features for Pixel users.
Most notably, the tech giant announced that Pixel 8 Pro users will be able to use the phone’s Thermometer app to take their temperature, or someone else’s, with a forehead scan.
When Google first announced the Thermometer app, the tech giant said you could use it to take the temperature of things like your baby’s milk bottle or your coffee.
Now, the company says users can use the app to scan their own body temperature.
Google also announced that it’s launching “Circle to Search, a feature that it unveiled last week, to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro users.
Google announced today that Gemini, its family of multimodal large language models, now powers the conversational experience within the Google Ads platform.
With this new update, it will be easier for advertisers to quickly build and scale Search ad campaigns.
The conversational experience is designed to help build Search campaigns through a chat-based tool.
The tool uses your website URL to create Search campaigns by generating relevant ad content, including assets and keywords.
“We observed that it helps them build higher quality Search campaigns with less effort.”The new tool will join Google’s other AI-powered tools for advertisers.
