Tamar Yehoshua has led Google's efforts to optimize Search across platforms, devices and languages and earlier this afternoon she took to the Expand stage to discuss how the discovery process has changed. Following her talk, Brian Heater caught up with Tamar to chat about the evolution of search and the company's focus on voice. Check out our video after break for the interview in its entirety.

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Google's search engine has a turbulent history in China, from search results being censored to temporary shutdowns. The company's most recent effort to serve mainland China with unfiltered search results met with an untimely end back in early December, Google confirms -- a warning previously told mainlanders when the search term they were using had met with issues (read: Chinese government intrusion causing lengthy connection times) for other users. GreatFire discovered that said message no longer popped up when searching for various censored terms on Google Search in China, and while Google's confirming that fact, it's unclear what the exact reasoning is. Given the rocky history between Google and China, it seems likely that China responded in turn to Google's efforts with its own -- or as The Guardian puts it, "Google concedes defeat in China censorship battle." Whether that's the case or not remains to be seen, but Chinese Google searchers should beware that your experience may result in some unfortunate connection issues from time to time (as much as 90 seconds), per China's censorship policies.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Via: The Guardian, The Verge

Source: GreatFire

Google just released an updated version of its Search app for Android devices yesterday, and it's now (as promised) also delivered a fairly big update to iOS users. That brings with it iPhone 5 compatibility, but the bigger news is the expanded voice search functionality, which promises "faster and significantly improved voice recognition," with spoken responses à la Google Now provided alongside the search results. Those additions also extend to iPad users in addition to the iPhone and iPod touch -- hit the App Store or the link below to take it for a spin yourself.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Mobile, Google

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Source: iTunes, Google Blog

It's election season and Google is doing its part to help you "rock the vote." No, the search kingpin isn't endorsing a specific candidate, instead it's doing what it does best -- help people search the internet for information. The company's open source Voter Information Tool is designed to help people research candidates and locate polling places. In an effort to reach the masses, Google is partnering with companies such as Foursquare and AT&T. Election Day can be a chaotic event to say the least. Hopefully this powerful new web-based tool will make things run a little smoother for frantic voters trying to beat the clock.

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Source: Google

Adding to the flurry of Mountain View-born announcements today, Google's just released an updated version of Search to the Play store. Available for devices running Jelly Bean 4.1 and up, this boost in functionality adds Gmail integration to the prescient Android software, in addition to tracking info related to flights, reservations for hotels and restaurants, scheduled events and even the delivery of packages. The company also bundled in a host of new cards for nearby attractions, movie openings, as well as expanded voice control that'll allow users to launch applications, check the calendar and set up future meetings. It's live now, so click on the source below to start your download.

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Source: Google Play

It's not a finished, Windows 8-tuned Chrome build, but we'll take it. Much as Google has been catering to iOS users who don't have its search completely baked into the platform, there's now a dedicated Google Search app for the Metro-inclined. Ignore the desktop OS foundation; the Windows 8 app is much closer to the touchscreen-oriented mobile version with its oversized search box, service shortcuts, an emphasis on voice recognition and finger-friendly instant previews of the results. Although incorporating Google search on a Surface will undoubtedly rankle Microsoft's Bing team, the app could be the ticket for many tablet owners who live in Google's cloud without using its hardware.

Filed under: Tablets, Software, Microsoft, Google

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Via: PCWorld

Source: Windows Store

Long before retail outlets were flooded with Android-powered electronics, Google embarked on its maiden voyage into the world of hardware. Venturing out into uncharted waters, the then only web search company released a glaring yellow box known as the Google Search Appliance. Sticking to its search engine roots, Google's first piece of enterprise hardware was designed to help its customers perform fast and effective searches of internal networks. While the GSA may not be the search juggernaut's most noteworthy piece of equipment, it doesn't mean that the company has abandoned its original vision for the platform.

On Tuesday Google announced its GSA 7 series, which introduces a new user interface, enhanced search tools and the ability to manage larger databases. According to the company, a single rack of its new search appliance can now maintain the equivalent of its web search index in 2000, which is around 1 billion webpages. Not just settling for companies using its office software suite, Google will be targeting large scale organizations with its new GSA. By remembering what brought it to the dance, the search giant appears to be setting the stage to transition from consumer to corporate search kingpin in the coming years. The only foreseeable threat to this enterprise search engine would be Microsoft releasing a corporate Bing Box, but something tells us not to hold our breath waiting for that to happen.

Filed under: Networking, Software, Google

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Via: Wired

Source: Official Google Enterprise Blog

As Google continues to improve other areas of its broad ecosystem, it's always great to see that the company hasn't abandoned its search simplification roots. A spokesperson for the company told us, "we recently added the ability to search within Gmail attachments as part of our ongoing efforts to improve search." This potential time-saver plays nice with Word docs, PDFs, PPTs and many other file extensions. Currently in its infancy, some of your older attachments may not have been indexed yet, so you might not be able to "share" last year's term paper with your younger sibling until Google brings the feature up to speed. However, if you're just looking to locate that recently received Word doc filled with notes from your study buddy, then have at it.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: Lifehacker, Google Operating System

Adding to the fun and games already hidden within its search box, Google's new not-so-secret addition gives you a quick way to calculate exactly how many degrees your favorite (or most obscure) actor falls from Kevin Bacon. Sure, it may take half the debate out of it, but at least the definitive answers are now out there -- just type in "bacon number" followed by your thespian of choice.

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Via: TNW

Source: Google

If you're sporting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean then one of its most notable features just got better, as an update for the Google Search update is enhancing Google Now (still getting adjusted? check the guide book for a list of commands) functionality in a few key ways. The new version brings public alerts to your Now page, with emergency messages like storm warnings or earthquake alerts, so if you're in range of Hurricane Isaac, it may be worth grabbing sooner rather than later. A more trivial change lets sports fans manually select their favorite teams from 140 pro soccer, baseball, basketball and hockey clubs -- we tried to find our college favorites and were denied, for now. While trying to automatically decipher our preferred squads from searches is nice, it might not be practical when we're just looking up information on our fantasy football players so this should be a help.

It has also added support for movie listings as seen above. Search for a flick that's in theaters and you will not only receive relevant information, but also when and where it's playing in your area. If that's not enough, it can be set to pop up on your "movie days" or when you just happen to be loitering outside a theater. Finally, in a move that should please many prospective Galaxy Note II owners it is ready to work in Korea -- grab the new version of the app at the link below.

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Source: Google Play, Android (Google+)

While many of us simply gravitate towards the companion search box or address bar to tap into Google's wealth of search know-how, anyone still visiting the original homepage should give that second button another glance. If you float your cursor over the randomized "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, the text will now spin through a handful of new options, reducing its arbitrary nature a little and, as AllThingsD note, guiding you to other Google services within the results, including location data, restaurant reviews and even its collection of doodles.

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Via: AllThingsD

Source: Google (Google+)

If you're looking for flight times, currency conversions, word definitions and more, you'll notice that Google has dressed up the responses in new, Now card type clothing. On top of being prettier, the look is designed to make the data easier to parse and also adds an interactive element -- letting you change a distance or unit when doing metric conversions, for example. Currently the refresh is limited to smartphone and tablet searches, but Google has promised to roll it out soon to desktop searches and international users. The change is part of an ever-evolving list of tweaks and updates to Mountain View's venerable search engine -- check the source for more info.

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Too lazy to download and install the brand new Android SDK yourself and don't feel like tweaking an AVD for optimal operation? Don't know what an AVD is? We don't blame you, and that's why we're here. We fired up Jelly Bean in the Android emulator and started poking around a bit. Sadly, most of the most exciting new features -- offline speech recognition, Google Now -- don't work. And we couldn't really delve deep into the new notifications system thanks to some limitations on the SDK. We could, however, play with the new version of Maps and demo the new widget placement tweaks. Most of the UI should look familiar. In fact, the only obvious changes we noticed were the new search widget and a few tweaked buttons, like notification clearing option. You'll also notice a new layout for the clock and date in the notification pull down. Mostly, from a aesthetic point of view, the refinements are minor, but welcome. Everything feels a little more spacious, less cramped, without becoming overly simple. Want to see it for yourself? Check out the gallery below and the video after the break.

Gallery: Android 4.1 SDK hands-on

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Google is announcing that it's going to place a flag on contentious search terms for users in mainland China. Mountain View's Alan Eustace euphemistically described how some searches break a connection to the service, leading to users being frozen out for around a minute each time. He theatrically added that the company has checked its servers several times and found no error, so whatever issue causes these outages must be external. Whenever a term is typed that is likely to cause an "outage," the error message in the picture above will appear, with a suggestion to search for something else, or use Pinyin to search for a term where contentious keywords appear inside otherwise natural searches.

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Google gave its official search app an iPad remake late last year, and now it's smaller iPhone and iPod touch devices getting the new UI's treatment. As of Google Search App 2.0, the smaller iOS devices see a big emphasis on full-screen navigation, with an automatic full-screen mode and a dedicated full-screen photo search making the most of the limited display real estate. You can now swipe back to search results like you could with the iPad, and it's overall much faster in the app to hop between different search types as well as web apps like Calendar or Gmail. There's still something in it for you if you've already been deep into the iPad port's interface, as the tablet and the iPhone alike can now save photos directly to the iOS camera roll. You'll need at least iOS 4.2 to live in Google's non-Android mobile universe, but those that measure up can leap in through the source link.

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Google just launched its Knowledge Graph, a tool intended to deliver more accurate information by analyzing the way users search. Of course, with a desire to provide better search results comes a need for improved site-reading capabilities. JavaScript and AJAX have traditionally put a wrench in Google bots' journey through a webpage, but it looks like the search engine has developed some smarter specimens. While digging through Apache logs, a developer spotted evidence that bots now execute the JavaScript they encounter -- and rather than just mining for URLS, the crawlers seem to be mimicking how users click on objects to activate them. That means bots can dig deeper into the web, accessing databases and other content that wasn't previously indexable. Looks like Google is one step closer to success on its quest to know everything.

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Americans and Brits might chuckle at their respective understandings of words like chips, pants and biscuits -- a search engine, however, can't be quite so discerning. As it turns out, Google actually thinks it can, and has been working on its Knowledge Graph project to prove it. Beginning today, English searches from Google.com might start seeing a new box appearing alongside (unless you happened to see it via the live-trial). If there is more than one potential meaning to your search term, Google will ask you to specify (trousers, not underwear, for example). Likewise, when it's more confident it knows what you mean, you'll get a summary box instead. (A celebrities place of birth, favorite cheese etc..)

Google's Shashidhar Thakur, tech lead for search, told us "We think of this as our pragmatic approach to semantic search." And by pragmatic, he means that for the last two years, Google has been working to map the "Universe of things," not just webpages. Over 500 million things, in fact, creating a total of 3.5 billion attributes and connections so far. The hope is, that as this technology evolves, you'll be able to ask more complex questions, like "Which US airports have a Cinnabon stall." Or, you know, other such deep and meaningful queries. If you see some info, and happen to know better, there's a feedback system, so you can let Google know, hopefully making Knowledge Graph continually evolve in accuracy. While it's only rolling out for English searches, it's not just desktop, with mobile and tablet search getting the goods too. There are plans to spread this out to other languages, but no specific dates for this just now.

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Zerg Rush is Google's latest easter egg and it's admittedly a little late for the holiday itself. Search for the term (it's a Starcraft thing), and you'll be welcomed by a point-and-shoot mini-game where your enemy is an infinite number of color-coded, marauding o's. These will proceed to decimate your search results, which is currently a bizarre meta view of people explaining the game's existence. Get your trigger finger ready -- the internet needs you. (You also can publish your final score with pride on Google Plus.)

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View's head of web-spam, Matt Cutts, talks you through it in the above YouTube video. The short answer? Lots of backend firepower and, you know, a few years in the search game. If you remember the Google dance, Cutts explains what caused that, before going on to give a good idea about how today's version of the site does what it does. If you're thinking this all sounds a bit too much like SEO 101, you'd be half-way right, but as Matt's delivery is so engaging, we're def hoping there'll be a follow up.

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