Google’s Search Results Ditch The Underlined Links, Increase The Font Size & More In New “Experiment”

No, it’s not just you: Google’s search results may look different right now, thanks to a very large “bucket” test currently underway, which has dramatically changed the look-and-feel of Google’s list of blue links. Most notably, the search result links are no longer underlined, the fonts are larger, and ads don’t have the usual yellow-colored background, but are rather just flagged with a small yellow label that says “Ad.”

Google often runs experiments like this to determine whether or not a change is either financially viable, benefits its user base, or, in the best case, both. Often, these tests fly under the radar, but in the case of something as significant as Google’s search results pages themselves, it’s hard not to notice when they change.

Some users are able to see both the current design and the new design when they switch between browsers, but your mileage may vary, as they say. (In my case, I see the new results in both Safari and Google’s Chrome browser on Mac.)

According to a report from Search Engine Land, Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal, told the audience at the Search Marketing Expo West conference this week that the changes users are seeing were just an “experiment” as per usual.

View the Original article

Google’s Schmidt Says Inequality Will Be Number One Issue For Democracies

Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaCrunchGovCrunchUTrendingYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftNSATCTVShowsTCTV NewsAsk A VCCrunchWeekFly Or DieFoundationFounder StoriesTechCrunch GadgetsGillmor GangKeen OnTC CribsTechCrunch MakersAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechCrunch EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldNews AboutSXSWCESE3All EventsSearch TechCrunchSearch TechCrunchSearchCrunchBaseFollow UsFacebookTwitterGoogle

View the Original article

No, Google’s Sundar Pichai Didn’t Say Android’s Openness Makes It Less Secure

Next StoryLooking To Make Fantasy Sports More Accessible, IAC’s New Fantasy App Lets You Play “The Machine” In Quick, Bight-Sized Contests

View the Original article

Talk About Timing: Google’s Reliability Team Sat Down For An AMA Right Before Gmail Exploded

Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaCrunchGovCrunchUTrendingYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftNSATCTVShowsTCTV NewsAsk A VCCrunchWeekFly Or DieFoundationFounder StoriesTechCrunch GadgetsGillmor GangKeen OnTC CribsTechCrunch MakersAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechCrunch EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldNews AboutSXSWCESE3All EventsSearch TechCrunchSearch TechCrunchSearchCrunchBaseFollow UsFacebookTwitterGoogle

View the Original article

CrunchWeek: Google’s Nest Buy, Yahoo Management Changes, And The Threats To Net Neutrality

Next StoryHow To Get An MBA From EminemFacebookTwitterLinkedInNest Acquisition, Yahoo Management Changes and Net Neutrality

It’s that time of week for an episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most fascinating stories of the past seven days in tech.

In this week’s episode, Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I talked about Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of connected device company Nest, the firing of Yahoo’s COO Henrique De Castro and last week’s news that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the FCC’s Open Internet Order, a blow for net neutrality.

Check out the video above for more!

View the Original article

Google’s New Smart Contact Lens Is Old News For Microsoft

Google today announced its smart contact lens project, but it’s not the first by a long shot (or even a moon shot). Other companies have long been working on smart lenses — including Microsoft Research, which unveiled a similar project in 2011 in collaboration with someone who now works for Google X.

Babak Parvis used to be a professor at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with Microsoft Research. He was of the first to work on smart contact lenses. Today, he is at Google and working on Google Glass and the smart lens project.

But as is often the case with Microsoft Research projects, it doesn’t look like the project ever went anywhere.

Here is the video Microsoft made back in 2011 to showcase this project:

It’s also worth noting that there are already some smart contact lenses on the market today. They don’t measure glucose, but the Sensimed Triggerfish, for example, is a disposable contact lens that uses a sensor to measure changes to the eye in order to personalize treatment for glaucoma patients. This technology has been available in Europe since 2010, but the company hasn’t received FDA approval to sell it in the U.S. yet.

View the Original article

Google’s Chromebooks Have Hit Their Stride

It looks like Microsoft was right to worry about Google’s Chromebook project. According to the latest numbers from NPD, Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all laptop sales and almost 10 percent of all computer sales to businesses in 2013. That’s up from virtually nothing in the year before. Given that Apple is irrelevant in commercial channel sales (it commanded a whopping 1.8 percent of sales), Chromebook’s increased share is coming at the cost of Windows.

A few years ago, Chromebooks were a bit of a laughing stock. They were underperforming single-purpose laptops that weren’t even good at the only thing they could do (that is, surf the web). Nobody really warmed up to them, despite their low price. Early sales were more than disappointing, and even Google’s few hardware partners looked like they were only doing this as a way to court Google’s favor. The whole project seemed doomed from the start.

But somehow, Google stuck to its guns and over the last two years, Chromebooks somehow went from being irrelevant to actually making a sizable dent in the laptop market. And not just in the business market. Amazon this week reported that two out of its three best-selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks.

Two years ago, it seemed Chromebooks were only doing somewhat well in schools. Those were, after all, also the only numbers Google ever shared. Over the last year, however, something changed. Google created a more diverse ecosystem of hardware partners that now includes virtually all major laptop manufacturers, including the likes of Lenovo (though only for education), HP, Toshiba and Acer.

With the $1,300 Pixel, Google even designed its own high-end Chromebook. My feeling is that Google gave away more free Pixels to developers at its I/O conference this year than it actually sold (that high purchase price is hard to justify for anybody who doesn’t regularly fly on a private jet, despite the Pixel being a great piece of hardware). What the Pixel did, though, was to show that Google was fully backing this project, which surely helped the ecosystem and potential business customers to warm up the idea, too.

Over the last year, ChromeOS also went from a one-trick pony to something that’s more like a “real” operating system (in the sense that it looks and feels more like a regular PC and less than a laptop that can only run a browser). While Microsoft loves pointing out that Chromebooks are only useful when you’re online (which these days is pretty much true for any computer anyway), one area Google’s engineers worked hard on was adding more offline capabilities.

Today’s Chromebooks are nothing like the old Cr-48 prototype Google once sent out to bloggers in late 2010. The fact that Microsoft has now started making fun of them just shows that it’s concerned about losing market share in the business world. Microsoft should be worried.

View the Original article

Google’s Top 2013 Search Terms In Asia Hint At Online Trends That Might Go Global

2013 might be remembered as the year Asian companies started making an undeniable impact on consumer Internet habits around the world. For example, just back in January, MG Siegler warned TechCrunch readers that “trying to suggest that Samsung is not one of the most important companies in technology is increasingly folly.” Now it’s the world’s leading mobile maker (though its rapid growth may have finally plateaued). On the software side, elements from Asian messaging apps like Line began making their way onto social media platforms like Facebook and Path, Tencent was cited as a major role model by Snapchat’s founder and China’s Xiaomi hired former Android lead Hugo Barra away from Google.

Tracking tech trends in Asia is a good way of gleaning insight into what might make it big in other markets. Google’s 2013 list of top search results for Asia show what consumers were the most interested in–and is a clue to the types of games, apps and viral weirdness you might see in 2014.

One standout in Google’s list is hit Japanese anime TV series Attack of Titans. In addition to Japan, it was also a top 10 search term in Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Combined, the results meant that searches for the show trended higher globally than Mad Men or Homeland combined. A campy take on disaster films with giant skinless humanoid villains, Attack On Titan might appeal to the same people who made “Sharknado” and “Pacific Rim” hits in the U.S.

One of the most popular games in Asia was Puzzle and Dragons, one of Google’s top search terms in Japan, where it was produced, as well as Hong Kong. Puzzle And Dragons’ English version is still relatively under the radar, but its popularity in Asia helped the valuation of its maker, GungHo Online Entertainment, which TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler profiled in June, soar to as much as 1.546 trillion yen, briefly overtaking Nintendo’s market cap. In Taiwan, MMORPG Fantasy Frontier was a major hit. An English-language version called Aura Kingdom will be launched soon.

Gangnam Style, the record-breaking viral hit, started going viral almost 18 months ago, but demand for music from the weirder branch of the Korean pop industry–which is usually known for its manufactured singing groups and cosmetically enhanced performers–continued throughout Asia. Psy’s followup to Gangnam Style, Gentleman, got 600 million views, just a fraction of the 1.9 billion racked up by its predecessor, but still enough to make it YouTube’s most viewed video of 2013.

Intrigued by K-pop but feeling fie on Psy? Singer Hari’s oddly mesmerizing music video Gwiyomi, in which she accompanied her lyrics with a series of cutesy hand gestures, went viral through Asia and inspired a wave of parodies and tributes. Crayon Pop, an all-female quintet that is known for its offbeat image and music, was also one of Korea’s top search terms.

Google’s top search results also give some interesting nuggets of information into smartphone preferences among Asian users. For example, many people speculated before its release that the iPhone 5c was a cheaper model that Apple would use as a weapon to challenge Android’s dominance in emerging markets, despite denials by the company. As it turns out, the iPhone 5c isn’t much cheaper than Apple’s “premium” model, the iPhone 5s. And, either way, consumers in growth markets still prefer the 5s to its more colorful sibling. In the Philippines, the iPhone 5s made it into Google’s top search results, but the 5c didn’t even break the top 10.

On a more serious note, Google’s data showed that people are now more reliant than ever on the Internet for information when natural disasters strike. For example, Typhoon Haiyan resulted in five times the search traffic than Typhoon Bopha did a year earlier. This means it’s imperative that governments and rescue organizations ensure people have access to emergency broadband access networks.

View the Original article