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.
Waze is adding a few new features that will help users navigate tricky roundabouts, get alerts when a speed limit is about to change and get warnings about speed bumps and sharp curves.
The new feature is rolling out globally to Android users this month and iOS users later this year.
Users will start to see alerts when a speed limit is about change along their route, giving them more time to adjust their speed.
This update is rolling out globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
These alerts are rolling out now globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
Airbnb already has labels like “Guest favorites” and “Superhost” to indicate the quality of a property or the host.
Now the company is adding a new label for the top 25% and top 1% properties on the listing page.
Usually, Airbnb releases updates twice a year with so-called winter and summer releases.
Airbnb said today that nearly 1.5 million properties would be verified by the end of this month in these five markets with a verification badge shown next to the listings.
Airbnb said that it plans to add photo and video verification tools for hosts to verify their listings.
Bitcoin’s rally is turning out to be bad news for Coinbase, the crypto trading app that has just confirmed some of its customers are seeing a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts.
The price of Bitcoin climbed in the wake of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, driving a 42% price rally this month.
Users of the Coinbase app grew concerned on Wednesday as they logged in to find their accounts showing a zero balance, despite owning crypto assets.
We are aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts & may experience errors in buying or selling.
Remarked one user on X, who shared a picture of a zero balance, “My mom called and asked me and mine was at zero also,” they said.
We’ve covered Lego Fortnite since it launched last month, when the new title lured in 2.4 million simultaneous players.
A little over a month after its launch, Lego Fortnite’s content was beginning to run dry for players who dove in headlong in December (present company included).
More on our latest update here: https://t.co/p28TYzZD49 pic.twitter.com/fzquiEGRVj — LEGO Fortnite (@LEGOFortnite) January 23, 2024Building-oriented players also get some tweaks to make things go more smoothly.
Some of those experienced are made by Epic itself, like Lego Fortnite, but most are “user-made” with Epic’s beefy game development toolkit.
So far, Lego Fortnite is Fortnite’s most compelling alternative offering — and a game that’s likely to build more momentum as the updates keep rolling in.
Japan’s first lunar lander has officially powered down on the moon after its solar cells were unable to generate electricity, though the nation’s space agency said there is a possibility of turning things around when the direction of the sun’s rays change.
Japan made history last week when its lander, called Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), successfully touched down on the moon’s surface last week.
Shortly after landing, directors of the mission explained that while the soft landing was a minimal success, the spacecraft’s solar cells were not generating power.
“According to the telemetry data, SLIM’s solar cells are facing west,” the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in the update.
Japan can count a handful of other major wins in the mission, even if the solar cells never manage to charge up sufficiently for a recovery operation.
Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 sales will be halted again in the U.S. starting at 5 PM tomorrow, January 18, due to the rejection of a bid by Apple to have the sales ban paused throughout its appeal of an ITC decision that found its blood oxygen feature infringe on patents by medical tech company Masimo.
Meanwhile, Apple has another route available to avoid a halt: U.S. Customs said earlier in the week that it would consider a software update that disabled Apple Watch blood oxygen sensing features to put the devices beyond the scope of the ITC ban, which means the company could effectively keep selling them if it pushes a firmware update to turn off all the pulse oximetry stuff.
Apple’s appeal will still continue, however, and this doesn’t mean they won’t eventually win that, which would allow for a resumption of sale with the blood oxygen features included.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow when that 5 PM ET deadline hits.
For those keeping track, this means the current Apple Watch models have now been removed from sale, resumed sales, and are pending another sales stoppage, all in under a month.
In an unannounced update to its usage policy, OpenAI has opened the door to military applications of its technologies.
While the policy previously prohibited use of its products for the purposes of “military and warfare,” that language has now disappeared, and OpenAI did not deny that it was now open to military uses.
Unannounced changes to policy wording happen fairly frequently in tech as the products they govern the use of evolve and change, and OpenAI is clearly no different.
It’s a substantive, consequential change of policy, not a restatement of the same policy.
Even a strict “no military” policy has to stop after a few removes.
Twitch is effectively banning the “topless meta” and other implied nudity streams with another update to its attire policy.
Although the content didn’t technically violate Twitch’s attire policy forbidding actual nudity, and was properly tagged for “Sexual Themes,” the streams were still controversial in the Twitch community.
Twitch has reworked its content policies regarding nudity and sexual themes multiple times in the past month.
The topless meta went viral late last year when streamer and OnlyFans model Morgpie began appearing naked in streams.
Her “topless” streams were framed to show her bare shoulders, upper chest and cleavage.
Google is launching a few updates to Chrome on desktop this week that aim to make your browsing experience a bit safer and give you more control over your browser’s memory usage.
The marquee feature for this update is proactive Safety Check.
Starting with version 120, which actually launched a few weeks ago, desktop Chrome’s Safety Check on desktop will now run in the background and send out proactive alerts when it detects if a password in Chrome has been compromised or when an extension you’ve installed is malware.
It’ll also remind you to update Chrome.
Google is also highlighting two other updates to Chrome on desktop today.
