Now you can stream apps with google

Google’s push to organize the world’s information has recently been focused on figuring out the best way to index mobile apps. Today, the company started indexing Android apps that don’t have matching web content, and even began experimenting with letting users stream apps that they don’t have installed.

Google has been testing various levels of app indexing for years, with features showing up as early as December 2013. The company typically begins with Android, and then considers expanding functionality to iOS. This time is no different: Both of these new features are only available on Google’s mobile operating system.

Until now, Google has only indexed apps that have matching web content, meaning you could always find a corresponding website with the same information. Now, the company is going after content that lives primarily in apps (it doesn’t exist online or it provides a poor user experience). Today’s debut begins with just nine apps: Hotel Tonight, Weather, Chimani, Gormey, My Horoscope, Visual Anatomy Free, Useful Knots, Daily Horoscope, and New York Subway.

“We want to make sure users are engaging with this app-only content” and that “the streaming experience works well,” Rajan Patel, Google’s director of mobile search, told VentureBeat. “If users enjoy it, and we see they’re using it, we will expand the scope.”

Additionally, if you don’t have a given app installed, Google will now let you stream content — as long as you’re on a reliable Wi-Fi connection. That means you don’t have to install the app to get the information you’re looking for.

In fact, you can even accomplish tasks like booking a hotel room without installing the app. When these apps show up in search results, they are accompanied with a Stream button. Tapping it takes you into a streamed version that you can interact with as if you had the app on your phone. Android Lollipop is required, tablets are not yet supported, and the search has to be conducted through Google (streaming won’t work through Google’s mobile site).

But how does the feature work? Well, the streaming technology is built “at least in part” into the Google app. But Google also can’t just stream any app.

“These apps are running on virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform, using the same technology as the Google Cloud Test Lab,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “It’s similar to a streamed video, but interactive, with swipe, tap, etc. signals being sent to the streamed app in essentially real time. We are experimenting with a few apps initially to get the user experience right, but we are looking to scale to more apps soon.”

This is a big play from Google, as it could fundamentally change how searching for in-app content works on mobile devices. Right now, Google serves up the app if you have it installed, possibly even the specific section with what you’re looking for. If you don’t have the app installed, Google gives you the corresponding mobile webpage. Going forward, Google will give you the app whether you have it installed (it just launches) or not (it just streams).

In its announcement today, Google also shared it now has over 100 billion deep links into apps in its search index. These include popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, and Pinterest. In fact, over 40 percent of Google searches on Android now surface app content.

Google is well aware that search has evolved from simply entering queries into a desktop browser. “We’re not thinking about desktop at all right now, in terms of experience,” Patel explained. This is all about mobile.

“Today, you’re more likely to be searching on your mobile device, and the best answers may be buried in an app … perhaps one that you don’t even have installed yet,” the company acknowledged.

And that’s exactly why Google is investing in indexing apps: The company wants all the world’s information, wherever it resides.

 

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See what google does for new search queries

Most people don’t notice when Google updates its search engine with new algorithms. But in order to help users sift through the billions of sites on the Web (with 822,240 new ones added each day), the company needs to keep improving its capabilities.

Bloomberg reports that over the past few months, Google has been testing an AI-based system called RankBrain to help parse users’ queries, especially those that the search engine has never encountered before.

Of the millions of queries it receives each second, about 15 percent of them are completely new to Google. RankBrain helps the search engine better understand these ambiguous queries, such as, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” so it can serve up useful results.

It works by embedding written language into mathematical entities that the search engine can make sense of. It also guesses which words and phrases are similar in meaning to each other so it can help simplify queries for Google to look up.

Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google said that of the hundreds of ‘signals’ that go into shaping a search algorithm, RankBrain has quickly become the third most important one in contributing to the result of a search query.

When the company’s search engineers who work on said algorithms were asked to look over a few pages and predict which ones Google would rank highly in search results, they managed to guess correctly 70 percent of the time. RankBrain’s success rate was 10 percent higher.

The use of artificial intelligence in search signals how software and services will be built in the future. Implementing machine learning allows companies to understand copious amounts of data to serve a global user base.

But these powerful technologies need a lot of work before they’re useful to companies and users. RankBrain was in the works for a year before the company began testing it with a dozen users and was then rolled out across all of Google Search.

Corrado notes, “Machine learning isn’t just a magic syrup that you pour onto a problem and it makes it better. It took a lot of thought and care in order to build something that we really thought was worth doing.”

 

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Top 6 Highest Paying Tech Companies

Management consulting firms and tech companies are known for high salaried jobs. These are rich margin businesses. Tech companies maintain pool of high skilled talent for their projects. IT industry has contributed great share to global economy in over last two decades. A famous online portal for employee and company rating and reviews, Glassdoor.com had published a list of top paying companies of last year. We have listed top six tech companies from that list.

1. Juniper Network

Juniper Network is largest networking equipment supplier in the world. The company sells its services and products to carriers, cable operators and internet service providers in the world. Employees in Juniper Network are very well compensated. The company has workforce of 9,483. The median salary at Juniper Network is $134,218.

2. LinkedIn

One of the largest social network for professionals, LinkedIn is known for the highest salary to its employees. The company truly cares about its employees, it provides number of opportunities to employees for their growth and career development. LinkedIn pays more than $150,000 salary to its software engineers and data scientists. The median salary at LinkedIn is $130,000 per year.

3. Google

According to Glassdoor’s report, Google is at the third position in tech companies. Google values its software engineers, product managers and research scientists. Most of the employees at Google have salary package of more than $100,000 per year. Company has very convenient policy for its employees. Google employees can use 20 per cent time of the daily hours for their personal projects. The median salary at Google is $125,000.

4. Twitter

The micro-blogging cum social networking platform, Twitter is yet another top salary paying company. San Francisco based company has very attractive employee policy. Twitter has reportedly spent $593 million in salaries in 2013. The company has been on top of the list on stock market too. Employees have ranked Twitter as the best place to work on Glassdoor. The medial salary at Twitter is $125,000.

5. Yahoo

World’s leading internet company, Yahoo has great culture. The silicon valley based company is known for high pay package to its employees. With the leadership of Marissa Mayer, things have changed dramatically for Yahoo. The company has come up with some amazing products in recent years. Yahoo has workforce of 12,200. The median salary at Yahoo is $125,000.

6. Apple

Apple values its employee more than anything else. California based Apple pays some software engineers more than $200,000 per year. Company gifts employees with promotions and stock bonuses every now and then. Employees have flexible work schedule, great work environment and number of opportunities for career growth. Apple hires the pool of talent almost every year. The medial salary at Apple is $123,284.

Google refuses to patch android vulnerability, leaving millions of android devices vulnerable!

Owning a smartphone running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean or an earlier versions of Android operating system ??Then you are at a great risk, and may be this will never end.

Yes, you heard right. If you are also one of millions of users still running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean or earlier versions of the operating system, you will not get any security updates for WebView as Google has decided to end support for older versions of Android WebView – a default web browser on Android devices.

WebView is the core component used to render web pages on an Android device, but it was replaced on Android 4.4 KitKat with a more recent Chromium-based version of WebView that is also used in the Chrome web browser.

Just a day after Google publicized a bug in Windows 8.1 before Microsoft could do anything about it, Tod Beardsley, a security analyst from Rapid7 who oversees the Metasploit project, discovered a serious bug in the WebView component of Android 4.3 and earlier that possibly left millions of Android smartphone users vulnerable to malicious hackers.

Android KitKit 4.4 and Lollipop 5.0 are not affected by the vulnerability, but over 60 percent of Android users – close to a billion people (950 Million) – still use the older version of Android 4.3 or below, which clearly states that the bug still affects more than a lot of people.

However, the response from Google after Beardsley notified the vulnerability made him and everyone of us stunned. Well, the tech giant won’t patch the vulnerability in the WebView at all. The quote from Google to Beardsley is as follows:

“If the affected version [of WebView] is before 4.4, we generally do not develop the patches ourselves, but welcome patches with the report for consideration. Other than notifying OEMs, we will not be able to take action on any report that is affecting versions before 4.4 that are not accompanied with a patch.“

As a result, only devices running KitKit 4.4 and Lollipop 5.0 will receive security updates for WebView from Google and the remaining Android versions will remain unpatched or rely on fixes from third party developers. The company has said that it will welcome third-party patches.

“Google’s reasoning for this policy shift is that they ‘no longer certify 3rd party devices that include the Android Browser’, and ‘the best way to ensure that Android devices are secure is to update them to the latest version of Android’,” explained Beardsley.

“On its face, this seems like a reasonable decision. Maintaining support for a software product that is two versions behind would be fairly unusual in both the proprietary and open source software worlds.“

In other words, in case if a hacker or a cyber criminal finds a way to exploit WebView on older versions of Android OS, Google will not release any patch for the vulnerability itself. However, if any outsider develops a patch, Google will incorporate those patches into the Android Open Source Project code and will further provide them to handset makers. This is where the company’s responsibility get over.

Though, Google says that WebView support in older versions of Android operating system is baked firmly into the operating system in such a way that it makes much harder for Google to create a patch to affected devices. This issue has been mitigated by the search engine giant in newer versions of Android by dropping WebView from the core OS and incorporating it into the Google Play Services app.

If you have some suggestions of your own please let us know in comments!

 

 

Google Updates Translate App With Awesome New Features

Google was expected to push out a drastically improved version of its translation app in the near future, but it looks like the new version of Google Translate has arrived even sooner than expected. The company revealed the upgraded service for Android and iOS today, introducing a couple of new features that should prove extremely useful for world travelers.

The first improvement is instant text translation, thanks to the overdue integration of Word Lens, which Google bought over the summer. In the past, you could snap a photo of foreign text to get a quick Google translation using the app. Now, you can simply point the viewfinder at the sign in question and get an even faster translation. The new feature works without an Internet connection, though for now it’s limited to just a handful of languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Google also added a “conversation mode” that should make it possible to communicate with anyone using your smartphone. Simply tap the microphone icon in the app and start talking. Google Translate will quickly figure out which two languages are being spoken and offer written translations of everything you say.

Google says the update should roll out to both Android and iOS within the next few days. We just checked and the update was not yet available in either Google Play or Apple’s App Store, but you can hit the source links below to see for yourself.

 

If you have some suggestions of your own please let us know in comments!

Cool addons for your google drive, try it now!

Google Drive is really cool. While it’s a handy alternative for those who don’t have a word processor or any office suite for that matter, it is an amazing collaborative tool for those that have one to interact, edit and share what they are doing. Further, cloud is clearly the way to go, and Google Drive is an excellent example of this philosophy.

1.MindMeister

Turns any bullet-point list into a mind map, and automatically inserts it into your document. This is a great way to visualise lists and quickly add a graphical overview to your documents.

2.EasyBib

Allows you to easily create a bibliography for your research paper. Automatically cite books, journal articles, and websites just by entering in the titles or URLs. Format citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago style.

3.Mail2Drive

Makes it possible to create a Google Drive file straight from an email message. When you sign up, you receive a unique, secret email address. Any email sent to it automatically gets converted into a Google Drive file.

4.Google Slides

Lets you create and edit your own presentations. Not only does it have everything you need to pull together an awesome presentation, but you’ll never have to hit save again.

5.DriveTunes

Allows you to play mp3 and m4a audio files right from Google Drive. Queue and listen to music in Drive, rather than just previewing it.

6.Maps for Docs

This add-on will insert a Google Map in your open doc. Simply select the entire address text, click ‘Get Location’ menu item, review the Google Map, and click ‘Paste to doc’ button.

7.PandaDoc

Lets you add legally binding electronic signature to Google Docs to close deals faster. Consist of more than 100 free business document templates, fantastic and easy-to-use project management and CRM partner apps.

8.UberConference

Lets you quickly and effortlessly get all the editors and viewers of a document on a conference call so you can be more productive.

 

 

 

 

Some best google services you might have missed this year!

Google is a billion dollar company that has developed more than its share of services. While popular services like Analytics, Search and many others are well known to even the least tech savvy users, there are many Google services that are equally useful but much lesser known.

1. Google Ngram Viewer

Want to search keywords in over 500,000 books? The Google Ngram Viewer is what you need. It is useful especially when you can’t remember a book, but remember excerpts from it.

2. Google Correlate

We all use Google Search, but in order to start a business, especially an online enterprise, one needs to know what others are searching for. Google Correlate allows you to view search trends over time. It is part of Google Trends.

3. Google Trends

As is evident from the name, this one allows you to find search trends on Google. You can find out popular searches etc.

4. Google Think Insights

This one is very useful if you’re starting a business. It brings you case studies and many other pieces of useful information that can help you with your enterprise.

5. Google Public Data Explorer

This tool allows you to search through public databases from around the world and find information that you need. There are also graphs to help you with the searches.

6. Full Value of Mobile

While a mobile site is more or less essential for almost every enterprise nowadays, this tool from Google tells you just how important it is. It is a calculator that tells you how much your audience uses mobiles for your website and how important a mobile site is.

7. Get Your Business Online

This one helps local small businesses in America to bring their trade online and optimise their profits.

8. Webmaster Tools

As the name suggests, this is a tool for webmasters, who can use it to monitor their website’s traffic and health.

9. Schemer

This is a tool that plans your to-do list for a particular area that you are in. It is useful for people travelling to new places.

10. Google Fonts

This is a variety of open source web fonts that can be used by anyone for private or commercial use.

11. Google Developers

This is actually one of the more known services from Google. It is a developer’s heaven.

12. Dart

While it hasn’t done so yet, Dart is a programming language that was meant to replace JavaScript in order to build web apps. It was developed by Google.

13. Google Keep

This is an app that connects your Google Drive to all your devices and helps manage various items.

14. Google Sky

Along with Google Earth and Google Moon, this is part of Google’s space initiatives. It is a part of Google Earth and lets you explore space while sitting at home. It has been developed in collaboration with NASA and the images come from the Hubble Telescope.

If you have some suggestions of your own please let us know in comments!

 

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Images to confuse google image search

Image recognition algorithms are becoming widely used in many products and services.

Images like these were created to trick machine learning algorithms. The software sees each pattern as one of the digits 1 to 5.

A technique called deep learning has enabled Google and other companies to make breakthroughs in getting computers to understand the content of photos. Now researchers at Cornell University and the University of Wyoming have shown how to make images that fool such software into seeing things that aren’t there.

The researchers can create images that appear to a human as scrambled nonsense or simple geometric patterns, but are identified by the software as an everyday object such as a school bus. The trick images offer new insight into the differences between how real brains and the simple simulated neurons used in deep learning process images.

Researchers typically train deep learning software to recognize something of interest—say, a guitar—by showing it millions of pictures of guitars, each time telling the computer “This is a guitar.” After a while, the software can identify guitars in images it has never seen before, assigning its answer a confidence rating. It might give a guitar displayed alone on a white background a high confidence rating, and a guitar seen in the background of a grainy cluttered picture a lower confidence rating.

That approach has valuable applications such as facial recognition, or using software to process security or traffic camera footage, for example to measure traffic flows or spot suspicious activity.

But although the mathematical functions used to create an artificial neural network are understood individually, how they work together to decipher images is unknown. “We understand that they work, just not how they work,” says Jeff Clune, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming. “They can learn to do things that we can’t even learn to do ourselves.”

These images look abstract to humans, but are seen by the image recognition algorithm they were designed to fool as the objects described in the labels.

To shed new light on how these networks operate, Clune’s group used a neural network called AlexNet that has achieved impressive results in image recognition. They operated it in reverse, asking a version of the software with no knowledge of guitars to create a picture of one, by generating random pixels across an image.

The researchers asked a second version of the network that had been trained to spot guitars to rate the images made by the first network. That confidence rating was used by the first network to refine its next attempt to create a guitar image. After thousands of rounds of this between the two pieces of software, the first network could make an image that the second network recognized as a guitar with 99 percent confidence.

However, to a human, those “guitar” images looked like colored TV static or simple patterns. Clune says this shows that the software is not interested in piecing together structural details like strings or a fretboard, as a human trying to identify something might be. Instead, the software seems to be looking at specific distance or color relationships between pixels, or overall color and texture.
That offers new insight into how artificial neural networks really work, says Clune, although more research is needed.

Ryan Adams, an assistant computer science professor at Harvard, says the results aren’t completely surprising. The fact that large areas of the trick images look like seas of static probably stems from the way networks are fed training images. The object of interest is usually only a small part of the photo, and the rest is unimportant.

Adams also points out that Clune’s research shows humans and artificial neural networks do have some things in common. Humans have been thinking they see everyday objects in random patterns—such as the stars—for millennia.

Clune says it would be possible to use his technique to fool image recognition algorithms when they are put to work in Web services and other products. However, it would be very difficult to pull off. For instance, Google has algorithms that filter out pornography from the results of its image search service. But to create images that would trick it, a prankster would need to know significant details about how Google’s software was designed.

 

 

US will be faster with high speed internet

Thought Google Fiber’s gigabit connections sounded fast? Forget about that — it’s going to be like dialing-in to 56k for folks in Minneapolis. US Internet has just announced that it’s bring 10 gigabit-per-second connections to the city next summer. The service costs a steep $400 a month, but “regular” gigabit internet will be available for a more palatable $65. The firm’s high-end connections will only be available to 30,000 households west of the interstate, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Minnesota isn’t the only state in the region getting a connectivity upgrade: the hills of eastern Kentucky are getting overhauled, too. The state’s eastern mountains aren’t typically known as a hub of technology, but state legislators have struck a deal that could change that. Over the next several years, Macquarie Capital will build a “ring” of fiber that runs through five Kentucky counties, eventually lighting up the entire state by the rend of 2018.

“Eastern Kentucky will bee equal to the word in limitless technology,” Congressmen Hal Rogers said of the deal. “No more boundaries sketched by our terrain, no more boundaries for high tech work.” Rogers says that fiber “levels” the Appalachian mountains, enabling the state to create a “Silicon Holler” that will keep Kentucky current.

 

 

Google Makes update to Find Song Lyrics

I actually spotted this update the other day when I was searching for lyrics to a Frank Sinatra song, but it’s now apparently official. Google has rolled out a new feature into Google Search that makes it easier than ever to find the song lyrics you’re searching for.  If you type “Frank Sinatra New York, New York,” lyrics into Google Search, for example, you’ll now see the full list of lyrics to the song.

At the bottom of the song, there’s a link to “Full Lyrics on Google Play,” which redirects you right into the Google Play Music Store where you can read them all, or choose to buy the song directly. It’s a brilliant way for Google to bring people right into its ecosystem, and it could increase sales if folks are searching for lyrics to a song they’re trying to buy or re-listen to. According to TechCrunch, it’s all part of a big boost to Google’s “Knowledge Graph” search technology.

Some songs might not populate just yet, which suggests it’s a work in progress for Google. Still, if it keeps me away from navigating to typical lyric-providing sites, which are often chock-full of ads, then I’m a happier Google Search user.