As part of an ongoing strategy to assist with the rapid evolution of the news industry, Google is introducing its Google News Initiative (GNI).

The GNI is the next step in the tech giant’s 15-year investment in the news industry.  For instance, last year they spent US $12.6 billion to drive 10 billion clicks to publisher’s websites for free. They have also worked closely with the industry to identify and help overcome key challenges, which led to the introduction of open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages, YouTube Player for Publishers, Google News Lab and much more.

But while these initiatives have aided publishers in Europe and the US, little has been done to assist the Australian news industry. The GNI is something that will address the issues facing Aussie journalists today, including the dramatic shifts in how journalism is created, consumed, and paid for. The program will be focussing on three core objectives:

• Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
• Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
• Empower news organisations through technological innovation

Elevate and Strengthen Quality Journalism

Fake news. It’s something that has been rampant across the internet for years, but Google is now working with publishers to elevate the accuracy and quality of content to stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation.

“On our own platforms, we’re focused on combating misinformation during breaking news situations. Bad actors often target breaking news on Google platforms, increasing the likelihood that people are exposed to inaccurate content. So we’ve trained our systems to recognize these events and adjust our signals toward more authoritative content.”

This is similar to the approach that’s been taken on YouTube, where relevant content from verified news sources is highlighted in the ‘Top News’ shelf. One of the biggest areas of focus for Google in terms of misinformation is to combat fake news during major breaking news moments, like political elections. As such, they launched the Disinfo Lab alongside the First Draft to combat the spread of fake reporting across the net.

Evolve Business Models to Drive Sustainable Growth

Over the last decade, Google has worked in collaboration with publishers to help grow their ad revenue. However, recent insights have shown that consumers are willing to pay for digital news content, which gives publishers the potential to expand well beyond ad revenue. Google outlined a vision to diversify revenue streams for publishers late last year, but now they’re launching Subscribe with Google, which is an easy way for users to subscribe to various news outlets.

“Our goal with Subscribe with Google is to ease the subscription process to get more readers consuming publishers’ journalism, as quickly as possible.”

In October last year, Google announced their dedication to finding ways to grow publisher subscriptions using Google data, machine learning (ML) and DoubleClick infrastructure. Now, they’re in the early stages of testing a clearly defined ‘propensity to subscribe’ signal based on the ML models they’ve been working with. A trial program that was run through the St Louis Post-Dispatch in the states resulted in a 150 per cent increase in page views to their subscribe page, and triple the number of subscriptions on a month-over-month basis.

Empower News Organisations Through Technological Innovations

Google’s top priority for news organisations is to deploy technology that can improve newsroom efficiency, enrich storytelling experiences and protect journalists against cyber attacks from across the globe.

Presently, they’re doing things like using natural language processing API to help sort, label and categorise more than 3,000 articles a day for newspapers. They’ve also made it possible for the South China Morning Post to use Google Earth Studio to create immersive VR experiences.

But, they still want to do more. As such, they’ve launched Outline, which is an open-source tool from Jigsaw that allows news organisations to provide journalists from Australia and across the world with more access to online resources. For instance, this particular program makes it easy for news outlets to easily set up their own VPNs on a private server.

Google has also announced that they will be committing a whopping $300 million towards achieving these goals, while also deepening their commitment to building products and finding solutions for the news industries specific problems.

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Google Australia launched the project last weekend by asking people to write a statement about themselves, or someone they love and respect, so the online giant can help people reclaim positive identity labels.

Each statement that was provided will be used to form an open data set that will help coders, developers and technologists across the globe teach artificial intelligence models how the LGBTIQ+ community speak about themselves.

One of the AI algorithms being used to make this project possible is Perspective. This tool is already being used by international news websites to assist with comment moderation. However, up until now, the full scope of its potential hasn’t been fully realised. The tool works by highlighting the toxicity of a comment as a person is leaving it. This will give commenters a chance to reflect on what they’re saying before they post it, and edit it. Google hopes this will help make online conversations more inclusive.

Originally rolled out in Sydney, the tool will be made available worldwide, so the tech giant can gather data that represents the global LGBTI+ community.

Google is a proud promoter of equality, with a number of the Project Respect team identifying as part of the LGBTI+ community.

“It’s been so great working alongside such a talented, passionate team to bring Project Respect to life. Many of us on the team identify as LGBTIQ+ – including me – and so we’ve experienced both the pride of being part of that community, and some of the challenges, first hand.”

While no official statement has been made about how any negative comments left in the system will be treated, Google has acknowledged that every step will be taken to ensure the success of the project.

Project Respect is now open online for people to leave their positive comments.

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According to Google, the speed update will only affect sites that “deliver the slowest experience to users”. This means only a small percentage of websites will be impacted by the update. However, a slow site can still rank well, but only if the page in question has highly relevant, good quality content.

This update was announced after a recent study indicated that the average load time of a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, but 53 per cent of mobile users abandon their search if a page takes longer than a few seconds to load.

More than half of Australia’s overall web traffic comes from mobile devices, however, mobile conversion rates are lower than those on desktops. The study, comprised of 900,000 mobile ads’ landing pages across 126 countries, confirmed that the majority of mobile sites are too slow and bloated with too many slow-loading elements.

From these results, Google determined that 70 per cent of the pages analysed took at least seven seconds to load the visual elements displayed above the fold, while it took more than 10 seconds to load all of the visual content below the fold. During this time, the probability of a user abandoning their search increases with every second that passes.

Of the pages analysed, sites in the automotive, retail and technology sectors were among the slowest to load. It’s believed these slow load times could be attributed to how much data is often crammed into a single mobile page. Of the sites studied, 70 per cent contained more than 1MB, 36 per cent more than 2MB and 12 per cent were storing more than 4MB. Considering it takes seven seconds to load 1.49MB with a fast 3G connection, it’s safe to say that a large portion of mobile websites are storing too much data on a single page, which is affecting loading times.

In light of these findings, Google has reiterated how important it is for developers to consider how performance affects a user’s experience of a page, and to always remember to compress images.

Things You Should do Before July 2018

There’s still time to improve the load time of your clients’ sites before these changes are officially implemented. While there isn’t a tool that indicates whether or not a page will be affected by the new mobile speed ranking factor, there are a number of tools available that can analyse a site’s performance, including:

• Chrome User Experience Report
• Lighthouse
• PageSpeed Insights 

These tools can highlight key user experience metrics, the auditing quality of a web page (performance, accessibility, and etc), and how well a page performs against the Chrome UX Report.

You can also test a site’s mobile speed to see how it stacks up against user preferences with the Test my Site tool.

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From in-car technology to Android TV, to next-gen VR platforms, Google took the world by storm in their conference. We’ve decided to present you with the real future of Google and highlight the services that we think are going to motivate you in 2018 and beyond.

The first on our list is Google Lens, which is essentially a photo app that retrieves and extracts information from the object you’re looking at. So, if you’re chilling out in the local Starbucks at Darling Harbour and want to connect to the Wi-Fi, Google Lens gives you the ability to take a photo of the Wi-Fi information, and log you straight into the network – pretty impressive right?

Have you ever walked through your local park and loved the look and smell of a flower and wondered what it was? With Google Lens, you can take a photo of the flower and it will provide you with the details of what it’s called, with further Google enabled searches to find out more. And if that wasn’t enough, take yourself abroad and use Google Lens to take a photo of a foreign restaurant menu – you guessed it, your phone will translate the text into any language you desire!

As well as this type of technology being extremely exciting for its users, businesses alone can benefit from Google’s services. If your client’s business fits into what Google Lens can offer, they could be receiving more traffic to their website and more customers through the doors. How many times have you walked past a shop-front or restaurant and wanted to share the information with a friend, or arrange a place to meet? This technology will enable users to share any details available about a business, with a simple photo. Presently, this app is only available on Pixel phones, but this is set to change.

In 2017, 20% of mobile searches on Google were made via voice, taking advantage of voice technologies, like Google Home. Google Home is another brilliant example of how its users and businesses can make use of its technology, in order to make their lives easier, or increase customer reach. The IO 2017 conference announced four new features being brought to Google Home, including hands-free voice calling, Bluetooth, Chromecast/Android TV integration, and proactive assistance.

Google Home’s hands-free voice calling pretty much makes your home telephone obsolete; with the technology allowing you to make calls anywhere in your home, you can even connect your mobile phone up to the device so that your own cell number is integrated with it. Alongside, you can use the proactive assistant to plan your day; any meetings that you have scheduled at work can be confirmed with Google Home, as well as possible delays caused by traffic on your route there. Admittedly, some of these features are slightly gimmicky, however, most are actually very valuable and could improve the quality of life for those who are less-abled, live out of town, or lead busy lives.

Businesses are far more accessible than ever before, connecting users via voice with a simple search, within a matter of seconds. We live in a world where we want things, and we want them fast. We don’t want to go around searching for a place to eat, or where we can find the best deals; we want the information handed to us, and for it to be easily accessible in next to no time.

Google has taken their original idea of becoming the best search engine, to a platform that offers so much more for the services of our future. Google’s Cloud Platform has grown exponentially, offering the world something different, from storage to networking, API platforms to management tools, and everything you could ever need to set up your business online. The cloud provides a stable and secure platform, using virtual machines; cloud hosting is very similar in terms of what it can offer compared to shared hosting, without an actual physical server. This benefits businesses as well as users, presenting high speed and consistently high performance, so the fear of any downtime is reduced massively.

Luckily for us, the fun doesn’t stop there. Google and its users have high hopes for the future, continuing to stay on top of, and pushing the boundaries of technology as we know and love it. We can only imagine what Google will present to us next, in their upcoming I/O 2018 in May.

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Google has recently confirmed that it’s made a change to the way it displays snippets in search results. Meta descriptions used to cap out at around 160 characters, however, now they can be as long as 320 characters.

Google has experimented with snippet lengths in the past, but has only started to roll out official changes since November this year. At the moment, roughly 51% of organic search results are now showing the longer lengths.

For example, a random Google search for ‘doughnuts’ returns a series of listings with meta descriptions appearing in both the new and the old formats.

When people started noticing that longer descriptions were appearing in search results, RankRanger started tracking these changes and determined that the average meta description is now sitting at around 230 characters.

What do These Changes Mean for Digital Marketers?

At the moment, it looks like nothing will change for digital marketers.

According to Danny Sullivan, the longer snippets are formed via “a dynamic process”, so digital marketers shouldn’t start expanding their tags.

To provide the longer, more informative snippet, Google is currently using the existing meta description, and then pulling extra relevant information from the page to bulk it up and provide extra value to users.

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As it currently stands, only Australians aged 13 and above are able to sign up for a Google account to gain access to their own email account, the app store and the internet on phones and tablets. However, now that 50% of children between the ages of two and 12 have their own phone or tablet, younger children are able to sign up to these services simply by lying about their age during the set-up process.

Family Link is a way to help children gain access to their own digital space, with their parents being able to keep track of what they’re doing and impose usage restrictions.

How Does Family Link Work?

For Family Link to work the child will need a new or factory reset Android device. Google will ask the parent to create an account during the set-up process, at which point they will be required to enter the child’s birthday. If they’re under 13-years of age, the parent can create a Google account that’s under their management.

After the account is created, Family Link will automatically be downloaded to the child’s device, and the parent will be able to choose which apps and settings they want to provide access to.

Using the app, parents will be able to manage the amount of screen time their children has, with weekly or monthly activity reports available, as well as daily screen time limits.

Parents will also be able to control which apps can and can’t be downloaded, and allow the device to be remotely locked when it’s time for them to study, play or sleep.

However, Google does acknowledge that no app can make services that are designed for adults 100% ‘child-safe’, but that Family Link will help parents stay in the loop and set ground rules for how their children use their devices.

Any parent who requires assistance setting up Family Link on their child’s device can visit the Google Help Centre.

The post Australia Welcomes Google’s Latest Android Feature, Family Link appeared first on SEMA.

Moving forward, AdWords can automatically over spend advertisers’ daily budgets by as much as two times the allocated amount.

In the tweet, Google announced, “To help you hit your advertising goals, your campaigns can now spend up to twice your average daily budget.”

This shocked a lot of advertisers and digital agencies managing their clients’ accounts, as the brevity of the tweet didn’t allow for further explanation. However, the link leads to the full announcement, which had been actioned earlier that day.

Those who actually read the link quickly discovered that advertisers “won’t be charged more than [their] monthly charging limit: the average number of days in a month (30.4) multiplied by [their] average daily budget”.

This means that Google will be actively monitoring your campaign, and making spend decisions based on lulls and spikes in daily activity.

Google AdWords had already been doing this, but at much lower increments, as before the update campaigns could only spend 20 per cent more than the daily budget on any given day, but still wouldn’t spend more than the calculated monthly average.

However, the announcement still left a lot of advertisers and account managers confused, so Google AdWords provided further information in a tweet that went out yesterday – a week after the initial announcement was made.

The referenced link details the specifics of Google AdWords’ latest daily budget updates, and how this will affect advertisers’ campaigns.

In this document, Google again emphasises how this over delivery will not cause an increase in the maximum monthly spend. These changes have merely been implemented to “provide flexibility during traffic fluctuations and isn’t intended to spend your budget more quickly”.

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Previously, the app had only been available on Android Marshmallow and Nougat phones, the Google Pixel, Google Home, and smart messaging app Google Alllo.

The program, which is essentially Google’s version of Siri, can do everything from telling you how to say “hello” in Korean, searching for recipes online or setting a reminder for you to pick up some milk after work. With Google Assistant for Android, and now, iOS, you’ll have your own personal search engine right in your pocket.

One of the best parts of this new system is that it works across all of your devices. So, if you add something to your shopping list on Google Home while you’re cooking, and something else on your phone while you’re on the go, the two lists will merge so that your complete shopping list can be easily accessed from any of your devices, whenever you need it.

Your Google Assistant will also keep track of your requests, so it can help make suggestions and will remember what music you like and what your favourite shopping spots are.

To get started, download and install the app on your phone, tap the microphone button and then type in your request.

Once it’s all set-up, it can remind you of your flight confirmation numbers, give you directions, convert currencies and even tell you what the weather is like in your area or on the other side of the world!

Google Assistant first arrived on Aussie shores on Pixel and Allo last year, but wasn’t made available on Google Home until July, Android Marshmallow and Nougat phones in August, and now, iOS phones as of early September.

Thanks to the latest iOS update, Australians from across the country will now be able to take advantage of Google Assistant’s useful, easy-to-use features.

To download Google Assistant for iOS, visit the iTunes App Store today!

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After much anticipation, Google Earth for iOS has been updated to include the same revolutionary features.

Plan Your Next Holiday With Voyager

Voyager is the new interactive stories feature that can be accessed with the latest version of Google Earth. Designed with travel in mind, you can choose from a range of destinations where you can explore street view, as well as detailed, multi-day itineraries and beautiful photography in 17 must-see cities from across the globe.

Found under the travel category, you can look at everything from Paris with Kids to St Kilda: A Seaside Playground.

Users can travel to the far reaches of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and learn about their native Brown Bears, trek Machu Picchu, or even discover new exhibits with Museums Around the World.

Voyager has more than 140 stories in eight languages, with more adventures being added daily. The stories are available in English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.

Brush up on Your History and Trivia with Knowledge Cards

Knowledge Cards will make brushing up on the history and trivia of your chosen destination easier than ever. These cards feature rich information about thousands of landmarks and destinations from across the globe, turning anyone into an expert travel guide.

If You’re the Impulsive Type, Check Out ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’

Google Earth’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature lets you roll the dice and explore a random destination. Simply tap the dice in the tool bar to discover somewhere new.

Send Postcards to Your Friends

To share your travel plans with your family and friends, you can even share what you learnt in Google Earth across your social media accounts via the new Postcards feature. Simply tap on the camera icon in the toolbar to snap a postcard worthy picture.

The new Google Earth app for iOS can now be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.

The post Take the Stress Out of Holiday Planning With Google Earth’s New iOS App appeared first on SEMA.

This new feature is expected to link users with valuable content, quickly and easily, as people will be able to automatically tell if the image is connected to additional content. For example, if the image is a product that’s available for purchase, it will display a product badge – shopping has never been so easy!

According to Google, its algorithms will automatically identify and badge GIFs but its recommended businesses add recipe markups to their page for recipes, product markups for shopping sites and video markups for sites with video content.

A number of publishers are already marking up their on page content, as it also allows Google to display their page more visually in Google’s organic search results. For instance, a blog article that contains a recipe can be marked up, so it appears as a rich card on the search results.

The release of this new feature comes only days after Pinterest updated their image results function on their app, and isn’t the first time Google has been quick to update their image feature to keep up with the popular pinning site, ensuring their users are able to do more with the popular tool.

Earlier in the year, Google also launched a ‘similar items’ feature on mobile results and Android’s Search app, which effectively groups similar items together to make shopping easier.

Google’s new image badge feature has been applied to image searches conducted on the Google app for Android and IOS, as well as mobile search results.

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