Four years after Laserlike was acquired by Apple to boost its web search technology, the founders have quit to rejoin Google. AppleInsider reports: Prior to forming Laserlike in 2015, Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary and Steven Baker were all Google employees. Their work at Apple is one reason the company has been predicted to launch its own search engine equivalent to Google's. Apple acquired Laserlike in 2018, though the deal wasn't made public until the following year. As part of the acquisition, the company's three founders were, and ultimately they led a 200-strong search team at Apple.

According to The Information, Srinivasan Venkatachary has now returned to Google. He is reportedly the company's new vice president of engineering. Venkatachary reports to James Manyika, senior vice president of technology and society. Baker and Shukla now both work on Manyika's team. It's not known whether all three quit Apple at the same time, or whether Venkatachary is just the latest to move. According to The Information's source, Apple is estimated to be about four years away from launching a Google Search rival.

Google is making it easier to find search results from Reddit and other forum sites. Engadget reports: The search engine is adding a new module that will surface discussions happening on forums across the web for queries that may benefit from crowd-sourced answers. The "discussions and forums" module will surface relevant posts from sites like Reddit and Quora alongside more traditional search results. It's not clear exactly how Google is determining what types of searches are best suited to forum posts. The company says the new "forum" results will "appear when you search for something that might benefit from the diverse personal experiences found in online discussions."

Google is also adding a new feature to news-related searches that will make it easier to browse international headlines that are published in languages other than English. With the change, news-related searches will also turn up relevant local coverage translated by Google. In other Google Search-related news, the company announced that starting today people in the U.S. will be able to use their new "Results About You" feature, "which aims to provide a simpler way for people to get their sensitive personal information out of the company's search results," reports Gizmodo. "Next year, Results About You will become proactive and allow users to opt in to alerts when new personal information related to them appears in search results, enabling users to request removal more quickly."

Alphabet's Google pays billions of dollars each year to Apple, Samsung Electronics and other telecom giants to illegally maintain its spot as the No. 1 search engine, the US Justice Department told a federal judge Thursday. From a report: DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer didn't disclose how much Google spends to be the default search engine on most browsers and all US mobile phones, but described the payments as "enormous numbers."

"Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won't change them," Dintzer told Judge Amit Mehta during a hearing in Washington that marked the first major face-off in the case and drew top DOJ antitrust officials and Nebraska's attorney general among the spectators. "They are buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot." Google's contracts form the basis of the DOJ's landmark antitrust lawsuit, which alleges the company has sought to maintain its online search monopoly in violation of antitrust laws. State attorneys general are pursuing a parallel antitrust suit against the search giant, also pending before Mehta.

ByteDance, owner of the hit short video app TikTok, has quietly launched a new search engine that promises no advertisements in a cyberspace where Google has not been available for more than a decade. From a report: Without any announcement, ByteDance subsidiary Beijing Infinite Dimension Technology launched the Wukong search app this month, within days of Tencent Holdings shutting down on August 8 its Sogou search app. Sogou, which Tencent bought last year, still maintains its web-based search engine. Wukong, currently available on Apple's App Store in China and various Chinese Android app stores, brings ByteDance into closer competition with Baidu, China's dominant search engine. The new app promotes itself as providing "quality information and search without ads." The line could be interpreted as an indirect jab at Baidu, which has long faced criticism for its paid listings in search results. In 2016, 21-year-old college student Wei Zexi died of a rare cancer after he received experimental treatments recommended by Baidu.

Google announced today that it's rolling out new Search updates over the next few weeks that will aim to make it easier for people to find high-quality content. TechCrunch reports: The new ranking improvements will work to reduce the amount of low-quality or unoriginal content that ranks high in search results. Google says that the update will especially target content that has been created primarily for ranking on search engines, known as "SEO-first" content, rather than human-first content. The company's tests have shown that the update will improve the results users find when searching for content like online educational materials, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.

The new updates should help reduce the number of low-quality results from websites that have learned to game the system with content that is optimized to rank high in search results. Google says users should start to see content that is actually useful rank more prominently in search results. The company plans to refine its systems and build on these improvements over time. "If you search for information about a new movie, you might have previously encountered articles that aggregated reviews from other sites without adding perspectives beyond what's available elsewhere on the web," the company explained in a blog post. "This isn't very helpful if you're expecting to read something new. With this update, you'll see more results with unique information, so you're more likely to read something you haven't seen before."

Google will stop giving snappy answers to stupid questions, the company has announced, as it seeks to improve its search engine's "featured snippets" service. From a report: That means users should see fewer answers to questions such as "When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?", to which the service would once merrily respond with "1865" -- the right date, but very much the wrong assassin. "This clearly isn't the most helpful way to display this result," said the company's head of search, Pandu Nayak, in a blogpost announcing the changes. "We've trained our systems to get better at detecting these sorts of false premises, which are not very common, but there are cases where it's not helpful to show a featured snippet. We've reduced the triggering of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update."

Snippets, which sometimes show up as a featured response to direct questions asked of Google Search, have long been a cornerstone of the company's AI strategy. The same technology powers its smart speakers and voice assistants, and lets the search engine satisfy search queries without visitors clicking away to other websites. But the snippets, which are automatically generated from the contents of websites, have also been a thorn in Google's side for just as long. [...] In an effort to address the root cause of such mistakes, Google is also rolling out new warnings for times when a search term has hit a "data void" -- a question where a good answer might simply not exist.

Google is still useful for many, but the harder question is why its results feel more sterile than they did five years ago. From a report: SEO expert Marie Haynes's theory is that this is the result of Google trying to crack down on misinformation and low-quality content -- especially around consequential search topics. In 2017, the company started talking publicly about a Search initiative called EAT, which stands for "expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness." The company has rolled out numerous quality rater guidelines, which help judge content to determine authenticity. One such effort, titled Your Money or Your Life, applies rigorous standards to any pages that show up when users search for medical or financial information.

"Take crypto," Haynes explained. "It's an area with a lot of fraud, so unless a site has a big presence around the web and Google gets the sense they're known for expertise on that topic, it'll be difficult to get them to rank." What this means, though, is that Google's results on any topic deemed sensitive enough will likely be from established sources. Medical queries are far more likely to return WebMD or Mayo Clinic pages, instead of personal testimonials. This, Haynes said, is especially challenging for people looking for homeopathic or alternative-medicine remedies.

There's a strange irony to all of this. For years, researchers, technologists, politicians, and journalists have agonized and cautioned against the wildness of the internet and its penchant for amplifying conspiracy theories, divisive subject matter, and flat-out false information. Many people, myself included, have argued for platforms to surface quality, authoritative information above all else, even at the expense of profit. And it's possible that Google has, in some sense, listened (albeit after far too much inaction) and, maybe, partly succeeded in showing higher-quality results in a number of contentious categories. But instead of ushering in an era of perfect information, the changes might be behind the complainers' sense that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results.

Alphabet's Google unveiled a series of planned upgrades to its search and maps services revealing the company's augmented reality ambitions -- and its appeal to a generation of internet users drifting away from the company. From a report: The new features include ways for people to search for nearby items using images and identify physical objects with their smartphone cameras. On Google Maps, the company promised a way for people to explore detailed 3D digital models of landmarks and neighborhoods before setting foot in person. Google shared the plans on Wednesday for the first day of its annual I/O developer conference held near its Mountain View, California headquarters.

Google is working to keep its products relevant and growing as users' needs evolve beyond text. "Search should be something that you can do anywhere, in any way you want, using any of your senses," Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president and product chief, said in an interview. Google's core search advertising business has continued to grow steadily during the pandemic, despite recent middling financial results. Yet the I/O announcements underscored nascent threats Google sees to its flagship services. People in emerging markets are more likely to search with voice features than typing, which has driven Google to invest more in its voice assistant feature.

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-oriented search engine, netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). From a report: That's big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the "Internet privacy company," offering a search engine and other products designed to "empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs," remains a rounding error compared to Google in search. Whether it remains a highly successful (and profitable) rounding error, however, could depend on how serious we become about the privacy of our searches.

Google has announced that it's changing the way search works on mobile devices, initially in the U.S. From a report: Now, when you reach the bottom of a set of search results on your phone, you won't have to tap to go to the next page. Instead, the next set of results will automatically load so you can continuously scroll down to see more information. The change will roll out on the mobile web and will be supported on the Google mobile app for both iOS and Android in the U.S. for most English-language searches for the time being. Because it's a staggered release, you may initially encounter some results which scroll and others that do not.

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. From a report: By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say -- and repeated in an interview this past Sunday -- that "search is not a solved problem." That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.

For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing "Things to know" boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there's a section of a video that's relevant to the general topic -- even when the video as a whole is not -- it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It's making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.

Google is so successful that it's the most searched for term on Microsoft's Bing search engine, the company's lawyer told a European Union court on Tuesday. From a report: "We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google," Alfonso Lamadrid, a lawyer for the Alphabet unit, said at the EU's General Court in Luxembourg. The tech giant has asked EU judges to overturn a record $5 billion fine and strike down a 2018 antitrust order that said Google unfairly pushed its search app on mobile phones running its Android software.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever tried searching on Google for one of those TikTok or Instagram videos all your friends are gushing about -- such as sea shanties or the Renegade dance -- you'll notice something. The videos don't show up. Google is trying to fix that -- but there's no guarantee its efforts will succeed. Google executives have been quietly negotiating with their counterparts at the video apps' parent companies, ByteDance for TikTok and Facebook for Instagram, to get the data it needs to index and rank videos, according to three people who were briefed about the discussions. Right now, the best results users typically see when they search are previews of videos from Google-owned YouTube, which at times hosts lower-quality copies or ripoffs of TikTok and Instagram videos. The talks show how Google is trying to keep its search engine relevant with more users as it faces new competition and regulatory threats.

It's long been known that Google pays Apple a hefty sum every year to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up from $10 billion in 2020. 9to5Mac reports: In the investor note, seen by Ped30, Bernstein analysts are estimating that Google's payment to Apple will increase to $15 billion in 2021, and to between $18 billion and $20 billion in 2022. The data is based on "disclosures in Apple's public filings as well as a bottom-up analysis of Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) payments." Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely "paying to ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it." The analysts outline two potential risks for the Google payment to Apple, including regulatory risk and Google simply deciding the deal is no longer worth it:

In an interview earlier this year, Apple's senior director of global privacy Jane Horvath offered reasoning for the deal, despite privacy concerns: "Right now, Google is the most popular search engine. We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia."

Google has launched an interactive and 3D periodic table of chemical elements to help students learn chemistry. Somag News reports: The new functionality is being integrated into the Google Nest Hub device to encourage chemistry students, but it can now be accessed from any desktop or mobile phone via this link. As there are a multitude of periodic table models available on the internet, Google took care to make yours different, offering some extra features. In Google's interactive periodic table, in addition to searching everything that is known about any chemical element, such as atomic mass and melting point, it will be possible to observe the number of electrons in the last layer rotating around the atomic nucleus through a 3D rendering. Also on display are some trivia like "Lithium is a metal, but it's so soft it can be cut with a knife."

The periodic table is coming in a bundle of Google Assistant updates designed to make family tasks easier, including creating reminders for the Family Bell. This feature, currently only available on smart screens and speakers, will reach the screens of all Android devices in a few weeks.

Alphabet's Google will now show its search engine users more information about why it found the results they are shown, the company said on Thursday. From a report: It said people googling queries will now be able to click into details such as how their result matched certain search terms, in order to better decide if the information is relevant.

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. From a report: The research project reveals how Google's service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences -- such as whether Beijing's Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters. Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. "Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities," Ochigame says. Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.

Just like Google's homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate. Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals "information borders" created by the way Google's search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.

Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan helped turn Google into an ad giant. Now they're starting over with a service whose only customers are its users. From a report: A new search engine? One that people have to pay to use? At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere. By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players. And we've been accustomed to getting our search for free since well before there was a Google -- which might make paying for it sound like being expected to purchase a phone book. But Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee.

Though it's extremely similar to Google in many respects -- with a few twists of its own -- it dumps the web giant's venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries, and other compromises. It's free for three months -- long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation -- and $4.95 a month thereafter. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal. Neeva may have a certain whiff of improbability about it, but its cofounders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are the furthest thing from naifs. Two long-time Google executives with more than a quarter-century of experience at the web giant between them, they have an insider's understanding of how it operates. Moreover, about 30 percent of the roughly 60-person staff they've assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). They've also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia.

Google has started warning users when they search for a topic that is likely to have poor results, as part of its effort to tackle "data voids" on the search engine. From a report: The new warning was spotted by Renee DiResta, an academic who studies misinformation at Stanford University. "It looks like these results are changing quickly," Google will now caution users. "If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources. First time I've seen this response from Google Search," DiResta said. "Positive step to communicating that something is newsy/breaking (my search was for a breaking culture war story), and highlighting that facts are not all known or consensus on what happened is still being formed."

While social media is regularly linked with misinformation, researchers have long cautioned that search engines can be powerful tools for spreading falsehoods. Data voids, search engine queries that have little to no results, can often lead to fringe claims being given undue prominence -- a particular concern for breaking news. In a blogpost, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said: "We've trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn't yet weighed in. We'll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available."

Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. From a report: Unlike other new search engines, which generally repackage results from Google and Microsoft's Bing, Brave is building an independent index of the web. (Brave Search will rely on Bing in some areas, like images, where its own results aren't yet good enough.) Initially, Brave Search won't show ads -- the chief way that Google monetizes its search results. Later, it'll offer free, ad-supported search and a paid option with no ads.