Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state attorneys general to discuss their investigations of Google and whether the company broke antitrust law. "The probes focus on search bias, advertising and management of Google's Android operating system," adds Reuters. From the report: The meeting is in the afternoon, according to one source, and will include officials from six or seven states, including Texas, according to a second source familiar with the matter. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all the focus of federal, state and congressional investigations following complaints that the four tech giants abused their clout in dealings with smaller companies. The probes are being carried out by the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the House Judiciary Committee. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has said he would like to see them wrapped up this year.

TripAdvisor is cutting hundreds of jobs underscoring the company's need to reduce costs as competition from Google intensifies. From a report: The online travel information provider is eliminating about 200 workers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company had just over 3,800 staff at the end of September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A TripAdvisor spokesman declined to comment, but pointed to a recent earnings conference call in which the company said it was "prudently reducing and re-allocating expenses in certain parts of our business to preserve strong profitability." Google has launched new travel search tools that compete with TripAdvisor, while adding its own reviews of hotels, restaurants and other destinations. Google has also crammed the top of its mobile search results with more ads. This has forced many companies, including TripAdvisor, to buy more ads from the search giant to keep online traffic flowing.

Google's latest design change to its search results received blowback from some who said it blurred the lines between search ads and regular search results. On Friday, Google responded, saying it will be experimenting with different designs, some that will not include the icons that make ads look similar to those organic search results. From a report: As part of a recent redesign to desktop search results, the company made paid links look more like the unpaid search results users see. The word "Ad" in bold text appears next to the advertisements, which typically appear as the first few results in a search and are therefore more likely to be clicked on and generate ad revenue for Google.

Users of Google search on desktops may have noticed a slight change over the last week and that change is affecting what they perceive as an ad. This represents a further blurring of the lines between ads and organic sources in search. From a report: Beginning Jan. 13, Google redesigned its desktop search experience to feature favicons, or preferred icons, next to every single entry, including an ad. Always shown at the top of a page of search results, ads receive the same favicon treatment: the word "Ad" appears in bold, yet small black lettering. Site owners can also choose their featured favicon. This redesign first appeared in May on Google search for mobile devices. At the time, Google said the move was prompted by a desire to help users "better understand where the information is coming from and what pages have what [they're] looking for." Bringing that same design to desktops this month adds to the consistency of the search experience, regardless of the device, according to Google. This isn't the first time Google has changed the look of ads in search. "What an ad looks like has gotten more subtle over the years," said Brooke Osmundson, associate director of paid search for NordicClick, a pay-per-click agency. "It's started to blur the lines between what users thought was an ad or wasn't."

Kim Lyons, writing for The Verge: Google added tiny favicon icons to its search results this week for some reason, creating more clutter in what used to be a clean interface, and seemingly without actually improving the results or the user experience. The company says it's part of a plan to make clearer where information is coming from, but how? In my Chrome desktop browser, it feels like an aggravating, unnecessary change that doesn't actually help the user determine how good, bad, or reputable an actual search result might be. Yes, ads are still clearly marked with the word "ad," which is a good thing. But do I need to see Best Buy's logo or AT&T's blue circle when I search for "Samsung Fold" to know they're trying to sell me something? Google says the favicon icons are "helping searchers better understand where information is coming from, more easily scan results & decide what to explore."

If you don't care for the new look, Google has instructions on how to change or add a favicon to search results. Lifehacker also has instructions on how to apply filters to undo the favicon nonsense.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers.

With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will "self-destruct" and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it's not tailored to the individual. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they've made.

"Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising; however, the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual -- it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat. OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.

Google announced last week the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place. From a report: EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box. A dedicated app for that provider will also be installed on their device.

Prominent figures from Jacob Gottlieb to Betsy DeVos got help from a reputation management firm that can bury image-sensitive Google results by placing flattering content on websites that masquerade as news outlets. The Wall Street Journal reports: Jacob Gottlieb was considering raising money for a hedge fund. One problem: His last one had collapsed in a scandal. While Mr. Gottlieb wasn't accused of wrongdoing, googling his name prominently surfaced news articles chronicling the demise of Visium Asset Management LP, which once managed $8 billion. The results also included articles about his top portfolio manager, who died by suicide days after he was indicted for insider trading in 2016, and Mr. Gottlieb's former brother-in-law, an employee of Visium who was convicted of securities fraud. Searches also found coverage of Mr. Gottlieb's messy divorce in New York's tabloids. So last year Mr. Gottlieb hired Status Labs, an Austin, Texas-based company specializing in so-called reputation management. Its tactic: a favorable news blitz to eclipse the negative stories.

Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News. His online makeover shows the steps some executives and public figures are taking to influence what comes up on the world's top search engine. It also illustrates that despite Google's promises to police misinformation, sites can still masquerade as news outlets and avoid Google's detection. Google removed five websites from Google News after The Wall Street Journal inquired about them. Google, owned by parent company Alphabet, said the sites violated its policies around deceptive practices. Google's news feature forbids "content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content."

Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational resources it takes to train computers for product search and similar "extreme classification problems" like speech translation and answering general questions. Tech Xplore reports: In tests on an Amazon search dataset that included some 70 million queries and more than 49 million products, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues showed their approach of using "merged-average classifiers via hashing," (MACH) required a fraction of the training resources of some state-of-the-art commercial systems. "Our training times are about 7-10 times faster, and our memory footprints are 2-4 times smaller than the best baseline performances of previously reported large-scale, distributed deep-learning systems," said Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice. Medini, a Ph.D. student at Rice, said product search is challenging, in part, because of the sheer number of products. "There are about 1 million English words, for example, but there are easily more than 100 million products online."

MACH takes a very different approach [than current training algorithms]. Shrivastava describes it with a thought experiment randomly dividing the 100 million products into three classes, which take the form of buckets. "I'm mixing, let's say, iPhones with chargers and T-shirts all in the same bucket," he said. "It's a drastic reduction from 100 million to three." In the thought experiment, the 100 million products are randomly sorted into three buckets in two different worlds, which means that products can wind up in different buckets in each world. A classifier is trained to assign searches to the buckets rather than the products inside them, meaning the classifier only needs to map a search to one of three classes of product. [...] In their experiments with Amazon's training database, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues randomly divided the 49 million products into 10,000 classes, or buckets, and repeated the process 32 times. That reduced the number of parameters in the model from around 100 billion to 6.4 billion. And training the model took less time and less memory than some of the best reported training times on models with comparable parameters, including Google's Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, Medini said. He said MACH's most significant feature is that it requires no communication between parallel processors. In the thought experiment, that is what's represented by the separate, independent worlds. The research will be presented this week at the 2019 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) in Vancouver.

Google has announced that it will stop indexing Flash content in Search as the internet prepares to bid a (not so fond) farewell to the multimedia software platform next year. From a report: "In web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content," said Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee in a blog post. "Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files." It is no secret that Adobe Flash is well and truly on its way out -- two years ago, a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020. Preceding that, Steve Jobs' famous Thoughts on Flash letter from 2010 helped set the wheels in motion for the proprietary software's eventual demise, with the Apple cofounder citing numerous reasons why his company's hardware would not support Flash, including performance on mobile and poor security.

For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for. And understanding that involves zeroing in on the meaningful keywords in a search query and ignoring the rest. Words like "a" and "the," for instance, can generally be safely ignored. From a report: The problem is that there are lots of searches where it's difficult for even a search engine as smart as Google to know how the words relate to each other and which ones matter. One example the company provides: If a user searches for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy," the "someone" is absolutely critical, since it's shorthand for "someone other than myself." A person would likely infer that that; a traditional search algorithm, not so much. But now Google is rolling out an update to its English-language search engine designed to give it a deeper understanding of such subtle queries, which will let it deliver more relevant results. For the above search, results are now topped with a "featured snippet" involving the specific issue of picking up another person's prescription. (Previously, the snippet involved prescriptions but failed to address the specific gist of the query.) I attended a press preview at Google headquarters earlier this week, where some of company's search executives showed examples of the new algorithm's improved results and explained the new technology that went into them. And they set the bar high for expectations; VP of search Pandu Nayak called them "the single biggest change we've had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning of the company."

"Where's the best place to hide a body? The second page of a Google search." The gallows humor shows that people rarely look beyond the first few results of a search, but Lee Griffin isn't laughing. From a report: In the 13 years since he co-founded British price comparison website GoCompare, the 41-year-old has tried to keep his company at the top of search results, doing everything from using a "For Dummies" guide in the early days to later hiring a team of engineers, marketers and mathematicians. That's put him on the front lines of a battle challenging the dominance of Alphabet's Google in the search market -- with regulators in the U.S. and across Europe taking a closer look. Most of the sales at GoCompare, which helps customers find deals on everything from car and travel insurance to energy plans, come from Google searches, making its appearance at the top critical. With Google -- whose search market share is more than 80% -- frequently changing its algorithms, buying ads has become the only way to ensure a top spot on a page. Companies like GoCompare have to outbid competitors for paid spots even when customers search for their brand name.

"Google's brought on as this thing that wanted to serve information to the world," Griffin said in an interview from the company's offices in Newport, Wales. "But actually what it's doing is to show you information that people have paid it to show you." GoCompare is far from the only one to suffer from Google's search dominance. John Lewis, a high-end British retailer, last month alluded to the rising cost of climbing up in Google search results. In the U.S., IAC/InterActive, which owns internet services like Tinder, and ride-hailing company Lyft have signaled Google's stranglehold on the market.

According to Abner Li from 9to5Google, Google is working on a new "Smart Screenshots" feature that integrates Google Lens abilities into the Google app's screenshot function. From the report: The Google app has long had an "Edit & share screenshots" ability where captures made within Search would reveal cropping and annotation tools. Meanwhile, Assistant has long maintained a "What's on my screen" capability that analyzes what you're currently viewing for search suggestions. Google app 10.61 reveals work on "Smart Screenshots" that combine those two features. Like before, a toolbar -- which interestingly uses a four-color light bar -- appears after you take a screenshot. A small preview is shown at the left with a pencil button overlaid. You can open the system share sheet, but the Google app also suggests a frequently used app.

The most interesting addition is Lens. "Exploring with Lens" could be intended as a "Screen search" replacement given that Lens is increasingly taking over visual lookup throughout first-party apps, like Chrome. After taking a capture, Smart Screenshots have an easy way to invoke Lens for search, OCR, and finding visually "similar items." The existing editing tools (Annotating, Cropping, and Sharing) will remain and this new functionality appears to even use the same settings toggle to enable. It's unclear if this functionality once live will again be limited to screenshots taken within Search, or if it will expand to be systemwide and invokable anywhere. A notification from the Google app could appear after capturing a screenshot.

Google is adding personalized TV and movie recommendations to search, in hopes of solving the age old question: what do you actually want to watch? From a report: Now, when you search Google for things like "good shows to watch" or "what to watch," there'll be a new carousel-style menu with TV shows and movies that you can swipe left and right on, similar to a dating app. Google says that it'll be able to curate those suggestions based on what you search: ask for "horror movies from the '80s," for example, and you'll get recommendations specifically for that.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Do a Google search for Basecamp, a web-based project management tool company, and you might see one or more ads for competitors show up in results above the actual company. Basecamp CEO and co-founder Jason Fried sounded off against the practice Tuesday, calling it a "shakedown" and saying it's like ransom to have to pay up just to be seen in results.

"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you're forced to pay up if you want to be found," he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. "It's a shakedown. It's ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad." The tweet includes the screenshot of an ad for Basecamp, reading "Basecamp.com -- We don't want to run this ad." The copy says "We're the #1 result, but this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand. So here we are. A small, independent co. forced to pay ransom to a giant tech company."

For the first time last month, a majority of all browser-based Google searches resulted in zero clicks, according to a new study from software company Sparktoro. From a report: The report's author notes that Google's functionality has changed to keep users within the Google ecosystem, not to always refer them outside of it. "We've passed a milestone in Google's evolution from search engine to walled-garden," he writes. On mobile, where the majority of search traffic takes place, organic searches have fallen about 20%, and have instead been replaced by paid searches and "zero click" searches, or search queries that result in snippets of information being presented, removing the need for a user to click into a link. In January 2016, the report notes, more than half of mobile searches ended without a click. Today, it's almost two-thirds.

ByteDance, the owner of short-video app TikTok, has launched a new search engine in China, entering a sector currently dominated by Baidu. From a report: Beijing-based ByteDance is moving beyond its core businesses in news and video and into work-place messaging and music streaming, competing with Tencent and other Chinese tech firms. The domain for the new search engine, Toutiao Search, sits within the company's flagship product - Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. ByteDance, which according to sources familiar with the matter was valued at $78 billion in its last financing round in 2018, declined to comment. The company said on social media last month it was looking to hire people to work with its search engine team, and had hired technical experts from Google, Baidu and Bing. It said the search engine would offer content from ByteDance-owned apps, including Jinri Toutiao and the Chinese version of TikTok, as well as the wider web.

From a report: Looking for a specific podcast has always been a straightforward process: Plug in the title or the host's name in an app store or search engine and you're golden. But when you're not sure what you're looking for or just want to peruse your options based on a topic, you've had to rely on articles with roundups of different shows, random Twitter recommendations, or bounce from platform to platform with your query. Sites like Listen Notes and Audiosear.ch (until it shut down in 2017), among many other startups determined to crack podcast discovery, were created to solve this problem by aspiring to be the Google for podcasts. But now Google wants to be the Google for podcasts.

Starting today, the company announced that it's updating its search function to include playable episodes within the search results around a topic. So if you're looking for "podcasts about grilling" or "knitting podcasts," results will surface with relevant episodes "based on Google's understanding of what's being talked about on a podcast," according to a Google blog post, "so you can find even more relevant information about a topic in audio form."

Google has opened up an auction to allow alternative search engines to become the default providers on mobile devices in Europe. From a report: Beginning in early 2020, anyone setting up a new Android device in the European Economic Area (EEA) will see a choice screen, where they will be asked to select which search engine they wish to use as a default. Four options (Qwant, Ecosia, Google, Yahoo) will be available, including Google, and these will vary from country to country, depending on which companies apply for inclusion. The move comes a year after Google was hit with a record $5 billion fine by EU antitrust regulators for the way it bundled its services on Android, with claims that Google forced manufacturers to preinstall certain Google apps to gain access to others.

A CBS News investigation found that some companies that are hired to make negative web pages disappear appear to be forging judges' signatures to trick Google into changing its search results. From the report: One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes. "It never even crossed my mind that people would have the guts to actually go out there and just forge a court document," said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in internet law. Volokh points out that forging a court document is criminal. "Part of it is just how brazen it is. They take a judge's signature and they copy it from one order to another order and they pretend something is a court order. It's cheaper and it's faster -- if they don't get caught," Volokh said.

CBS News worked with Volokh and identified more than 60 fraudulent court orders sent to Google. Some are obviously fake, like one with a case number of "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9." Others are more sophisticated, and appear to be drawn from nine different federal courts across the country. The most recent fake court document we identified was submitted in April. It's not just about making a bad review of a local restaurant disappear. CBS News uncovered bogus court documents submitted on behalf of two convicted criminals who wanted Google to forget about their crimes. Both were child sex offenders. Of the more than 60 phony documents, we found that 11 had signatures forged from judges in Hamilton County, Ohio.