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Tony Edward   http://www.gszon.blogspot.com.ng  By now the majority of searchers on Google are familiar with the Knowledge Graph box, which appears on the right side of the search results page and highlights information about various entities (companies, people, places, things and so on). In the past, I’ve written about how to both  obtain  and  optimize  a Knowledge Graph result. In my attempts to learn more and get a better understanding of Google’s Knowledge Graph, I’ve discovered some cool hacks and tricks. While these tricks do not have any significant practical implications, they can serve as a way to better understand how Google’s Knowledge Graph works, which can be used to optimize your personal or company Knowledge Graph results. Before getting into the tricks, let’s break down some important items. For the examples below, I used Donald Trump. Google Knowledge Graph API The  Google Knowledge Graph API  is a tool that can be used to get insight into your Knowledge Graph r

Whether to improve relevancy with their content or to keep competitors from advertising on their pages, publishers want control over the types of ads that can run on their sites. Google  announced  Tuesday that it is expanding the capability for publishers to opt out of certain ad categories and has increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. More detailed subcategories give publishers greater refinement in blocking ads on their sites. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories, “Sunglasses,” “Handbags” or “Watches.” The feature is now available in all AdSense markets and supports Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian and Turkish, in addition to English.

Ever have a hard time understanding a road sign in another country? Computer vision startup Mapillary thinks it has a solution. You know how Google hopes to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” Swedish startup Mapillary wants to do the same thing with the world’s road signs. As it turns out, from warnings about polar bears to alerts concerning “ invisible cows ,” there are some pretty darn unusual roadside messages you’ll come across as you travel the globe. But if you’re only used to the regular old boring signs found in your neighborhood, being expected to understand all of them from behind the wheel is a tall order. Throw self-driving cars — which need to understand this stuff to get you safely from point A to point B — into the mix and things become even more confusing. Computer vision company  Mapillary  has spent the past several years working on just this problem. “Mapillary is a collaborative street-level imagery platform power

A new feature makes it easier to make sure the page you're seeing from an AMP search result is legit and lets you share the "real" URL with others. AMP pages are great . They are designed to help us find what we're looking for when we're mobile and point us towards search results that are easy to read because they were designed for a smaller screen and touch-based navigation. So many people use their phones to get on the internet and get the information they need that anything that makes the experience better is welcomed. On the web, trust is important. You need to know you're seeing results from a place you trust. But there are a few drawbacks to using AMP URLs, too. One is that they require a separate (and sometimes frequently changed) URL to be cached by Google, and this breaks the traditional way the web works. When something goes on the internet, it should be there forever, in the same place. Moving the URL we use from a mobile device around can mak

WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU The Super Bowl ad for Google Home showed off the device's keen sense of hearing and attention to the "OK Google" wake word. Right around the time New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady orchestrated the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history, Google officially introduced the world to its  Amazon Echo -competing home servant,  Google Home . A  one-minute advertisement  showing off the different ways in which people have the ability to interact with Home, the spot featured — over and over again, mind you — people uttering its popular wake word, “OK Google.” Due in part to the wake word’s prominent feature, Google Home users all over the country say their devices acted a bit erratic during the ad, responding to the commercial’s commands. At least it’s reassuring to know the Home as a keen ear for its wake word, right? Though the gaffe didn’t cause any serious harm to anyone — unless, of course, it accidentally turned off the lights while someone

WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU BT's public support could pave the way for other groups to chime in on the Android antitrust case, the result of which could have far-reaching implications for Google. BT, a telecommunications provider in the United Kingdom, has sent a letter to the European Commission announcing its support for Google in an  ongoing antitrust case  involving Android, the world’s largest mobile operating system. The European Commission alleges that Google is using Android’s dominant market share as a way to push its own apps and services, like Search, Drive, YouTube, and Google Maps. Anyone is free to use Android, but if a manufacturer wants access to the Google Play Store — where about  2.6 million apps reside  — they have to sign the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement and prioritize Google’s apps. More:   Microsoft’s unified user interface may be the namesake of Google’s hybrid OS Manufacturers can still preload their own apps or ones from competing services lik

Retailers that sell online and in-store need to balance where to send users in their paid search efforts. Columnist Andy Taylor explores when advertisers might want to rely on local inventory versus regular product listing ads. Andy Taylor  on February 3, 2017 at 10:30 am In response to the growing popularity of searches with local intent, Google released  Local Inventory Ads  (LIA) a few years ago as a variation of  Product Listing Ads  (PLA) that include information on when a product is available at a nearby store location. Taking into account the local intent of each search query in determining when LIAs should be featured, Google can serve these units in a similar format to traditional PLAs, as well as in other LIA-specific formats, such as beneath a Google Maps display. These units are steadily becoming an important part of paid search campaigns for brands with brick-and-mortar locations, and LIA traffic increased 60 percent Y/Y in Q3 2016 for the median Merkle retailer. How

Last year, Google introduced  local search ads and promoted pins  to wring a few extra dollars out of Maps. By extra, I mean potentially an additional  $1.5 billion in 2017  alone. Maps inherently have local intent; local intent has a high likelihood for conversion. No surprises there. But ads run counter to a quality user experience. We as advertisers can perform all the mental gymnastics we want, but the truth is, ads are a nuisance. Especially on maps. When you’re looking for a location, the last thing you want to see is a map resembling a pincushion or a shotgun’s scatter pattern. Striking the right balance between organic and paid listings is critical. Unfortunately, as the screen size shrinks, the challenge of balancing paid and organic gets magnified on the map. On desktop, there aren’t so many paid ads that you can’t find organic listings. In fact, it’s almost a happy compromise. You get to use Google’s mapping services for free; Google gets to turn a profit. Fair deal. Wi

Snap and Google will be partnered for the next five years, according to Snap’s S-1 filing released last week. Completed on January 30, the deal commits Snap to purchasing $400 million in Google's cloud services annually until 2022, totaling $2 billion over the period. The new lease is a formal continuation of a partnership that began around 2013,  TechCrunch notes .  The deal is a big win for Google Cloud, as mobile video is poised to make up a larger portion of the data storage space. Snapchat users are highly engaged, with the average daily user turning to the app 18 times each day, according to Snap's S-1. And although Google doesn’t break out revenue from its cloud business, instead lumping it together with nonadvertising, which includes the Google Play store, the $400 million deal will give it a hefty annual bump. In Q4 2016, nonadvertising accrued $3.4 billion in sales. Mobile video already accounts for more than half of all mobile traffic. In 2015, mobile video acco

The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017 Social media companies Facebook, Google and a group of news organizations launched an initiative on Monday to tackle fake news stories in France, with the media in the spotlight as the country's presidential election approaches. Facebook said it would work with several leading French news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, BFM TV, and newspapers L'Express and Le Monde to ensure that false news items were not published on its platform. Google also said it was part of the initiative, dubbed "Cross Check" by the partners. Facebook has faced criticism that it did not do enough to prevent false information being republished on its platform during last year's U.S presidential campaign, and in response has set up measures to try to tackle the problem. There have been similar concerns that people could disseminate false information on Faceb

Finding an image on  Google Photos  just got a tad easier. In an Android-only update Thursday, Feb. 2, Google reworked the albums feature, adding enhanced organization to the ways albums are displayed. The albums tab is now divided  into three parts . Along with sorting your actual albums, the app now separates images based on what app you shot them with. A third category auto-organizes photos by location and what’s inside them. While the auto albums isn’t a new feature, the new organization makes them easier to find. More:   Google Photos is one year old — here’s what’s next for it Along with the three new sections, the photos inside the albums are  easier to search through . That’s because Google switched up the large cover photo at the top to take up half as much room. That small design switch allows users to see more albums on the screen at one time, speeding up the process of finding a specific one. Version 2.8 of Google Photos is the app’s first significant update of the yea

Improvements coming to the integration of Progressive Web Apps on Android. Google is continually looking to empower developers with more tools to help deliver great web apps for Android users. It began back in 2015 , when Google first introduced Progressive Web Apps as a feature in Chrome for Android, which allowed developers to create web apps that prompt users to add a site shortcut to their Home screen while offering features such as push notifications. Google is ready to introduce the latest version of this experience which will start rolling out to the Chrome beta over the next few weeks. The aim is to make things much more convenient for users by improving the overall integration with the Android OS. From the  Chromium blog : For example, Progressive Web Apps will now appear in the app drawer section of the launcher and in Android Settings, and will be able to receive incoming intents from other apps. Long presses on their notifications will also reveal the normal Android no

War. War never changes — but Google's mind does. There is some indication that Google is pulling the Google Now Launcher  from the Play Store sometime before the end of March 2017 (Q1). Besides trying to find out more details about this one, we're also left wondering why? Let's start at the beginning. The  Google Now Launcher  is a home screen manager that Google made using the Android launcher code as a base. Originally only for the Nexus 5, it later expanded to include all Nexus and Google Play edition phones. Eventually, every phone that has Android 4.1 or later could go to Google Play and install it like any other launcher. It is also the launcher that comes with recent Nexus phones, including the  Nexus 6P  and  Nexus 5X . The Google Now part of the Google Now Launcher is still here and can be used by the people who made your phone. It's not an open source Android thing — it's an app made by Google that might come with your phone but isn't part of An

Do you want Andromeda? Because this is how you make Andromeda. I remember thinking last November (2016 if you're reading this from the future), while watching speakers at the  Chrome Dev Summit , that Google remembered how important the web was several times. Not the internet where data files back and forth, but the web, the part of that internet you see through a web browser. Whether you're using Chrome or another program that is built for seeing all the things on the web, or a component in another app that can show you a part of the web that's meaningful and relevant to what you're doing right this moment, the web is a powerful medium for all things. It's also one of the first user experiences we all had and our children may have. The web was was the first look at what we call User Experience for all things tech. OK, maybe  remember  isn't the right word here. Google has spent countless amounts of money and time building tools to both make the web and s

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it would sell its satellite imaging business, Terra Bella, to Planet Labs, a San Francisco-based private satellite operator founded by former NASA scientists. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Planet Labs will acquire the Terra Bella business including the SkySat constellation of satellites, Alphabet said. bit.ly/2kqmTfL Google will enter into a multi-year contract to purchase Earth-imaging data from Planet Labs after the deal closes. Google had acquired Terra Bella, originally known as Skybox Imaging, for $500 million in 2014. The deal will help Planet Labs broaden its available data and add new customers. Planet Labs is one of several startups aiming to harness technology allowing satellites to become smaller and less expensive, making it easier to deploy large networks of satellites at less risk and lower cost than previously.

A U.S. judge has ordered Google to comply with search warrants seeking customer emails stored outside the United States, diverging from a federal appeals court that reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case involving Microsoft Corp. U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter in Philadelphia ruled on Friday that transferring emails from a foreign server so FBI agents could review them locally as part of a domestic fraud probe did not qualify as a seizure. The judge said this was because there was "no meaningful interference" with the account holder's "possessory interest" in the data sought. "Though the retrieval of the electronic data by Google from its multiple data centers abroad has the potential for an invasion of privacy, the actual infringement of privacy occurs at the time of disclosure in the United States," Rueter wrote. Google, a unit of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet Inc, said in a statement on Saturday: "The magistrate i

A year after Amazon’s Echo starred in a Super Bowl commercial, Google Home gets its turn in the spotlight with a 60-second ad that will air Sunday during this year’s Super Bowl. It’s not Google’s first Super Bowl ad; that happened all the way back in 2010 when Google ran the well-received  Parisian Love ad . But it is the first Super Bowl ad for Google Home, the company’s in-home voice assistant that’s only been  available to consumers since October . You’ll recognize the commercial as very “Googley” — it has a very personal and homey feel and portrays a cross-section of people using the device in various times of need. The ad ends with the tagline, “Home by you. Help by Google.” There’s no pricing information or even anything that tells consumers where to buy Home Google is battling Amazon — and to a lesser degree right now, Apple (Siri) and Microsoft (Cortana) — for the expanding voice assistant market. One  recent estimate  suggests there’ll be more than 30 million voice-based de

FORMER Vice President of Nigeria Atiku Abubakar privately owned University,  the  America University of Nigeria, AUN,  Yola has been described by Google as one of world’s leading centers of excellence. Also as part of moves to boost ICT infrastructure in the Institution, Google, an  Internet multilingual and social networking and identity service  has entered into a  major collaboration effort with the University, just as  the AUN gained a grant of USD 112,400 (about N17,000,000) from the internet giants. According to AUN, it has  been working on this collaboration for almost a year and under this agreement, the University will use funds from Google to purchase goods and services that will help support and expand its network. In a statement by the Chief Information Officer of AUN, Mr. Julius Ayuk Tabe SUnday, the University announced that the collaboration will also boost its Internet availability on campus. Six other universities, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Sene