Tag Archives: online industry news

So far, Google has not officially launched a censored search engine for use in China. It may never do so. However, earlier reports that the tech giant was at least testing a search engine seem to be correct. The tests are underway and Google is fairly pleased with the results thus far. In fact, they said that the new search engine can "serve results for 99 percent of queries." That is a very good success rate overall, especially since this is still in the testing phases and does not appear close to a launch. What does Google stand to gain by offering their search engine in China? And why haven't they already made this move given the potential market?

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Efforts to combat the spread of fake news, misinformation or otherwise false and misleading content online is rapidly becoming a top priority for many social media platforms. Facebook recently announced further efforts to reign in the proliferation of false information by fact-checking images and video, rather than just text. Through collaboration with third party, independent fact checkers and sophisticated artificial intelligence models, Facebook hopes to rapidly identify inaccurate content and, similar to techniques designed to combat malware, quickly quarantine and remove it before it can spread to other users online.

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From scanning news headlines to checking weather and traffic updates, and shopping online, search engines offer us rapid access to simple data we rely on to make it through each day. But where do we turn when our information needs to transcend the mundane and we require paths to deeper, more complex data?

Google’s AI Research Scientist, Natasha Noy, recently announced the debut of a new Dataset Search tool designed to place bigger datasets from a wide range of sources at users’ fingertips. Although initially focused on academic circles, this tool has far-reaching implications for additional sectors and users.

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Last week, it was reported that Instagram now has a community of over 400 million active users, which makes it officially more popular than Twitter. This is just the latest in a string of not-so-great news for the network: its value has plummeted since its IPO in 2013, its growth has flatlined, and many of its new users are quick to abandon it.

In an effort to combat all this, Twitter has revealed some new features such as Moments, which will make users' timelines more organized and easy to understand. For content creators and marketers, however, the most important change involves the famous 140-character limit.

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It's commonly accepted that Google+ is nowhere near as successful a social network as Facebook or Twitter, despite having respectable user numbers. At the same time, Content Customs often argues that Google+ is a worthwhile platform for businesses; not only to gain exposure in a fashion similar to being on other social networks, but also for SEO advantages.

Now, even those benefits might be waning. With Google+ splitting up into separate services, it's unclear if the platform will remain advantageous for brands.

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