Google brings AR animals into the Search App

A new card in Google Search will bring virtual animals into your space—if you have an augmented reality-enabled phone, that is. This new feature is one of the many introduced at this year’s I/O developer conference. The feature works on animals like cats, dogs, pandas, alpine goats, angler fish, lions, timberwolves, bears, European hedgehogs, tigers, and emperor penguins. When you do a search for these animals, a card saying “Meet a life-sized [animal] up close” will pop up. In the same card, you’ll see a “View in your own space” button to place the virtual animal into your environment.

Like any AR sticker, you can move these around or resize them. The animals even come with sound effects. You can see the dog bark and scratch its ears or the panda chews on a piece of bamboo. If you have a device ready to support this feature, you’ll need to allow it to access your camera and storage for the first time you use the feature.

Source: Engadget

Google to bring Full Coverage feature and podcasts right into Search

Google’s Search engine has a lot of nifty tricks you can use it for. One of the newest tricks it’s getting revolves around news and podcasts. Google Search will be getting support for Google News’ Full Coverage feature. Launched last year, this feature introduces a more complete picture of a certain story. It introduces a timeline of how events unfold, so you get a better understanding of how it happened. As mentioned, this was unveiled in the Google News app, but it’ll be making its way to Search.

Search will also be getting support for podcasts. This means you can play them right from Search. It’ll surface relevant episodes of a given program based both on the title and content. You can even save episodes for later listening. It isn’t clear if podcasters will gain access to analytics based on those who listen right from Search. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, "These are all examples of how we are making search even more helpful for our users by surfacing the right information in the right context."

Source: TechCrunch

Google gamifies its top search results of 2018

While 2018 felt like a rather turbulent year, to say the least, Google wants to soften the blow a bit or focus on the other big news of the year by gamifying its top search results of the year. Game of the Year 2018 will test your knowledge of the top search trends of 2018 in a click-to-choose format. It’s also a good source of random trivia—like who appeared in search results more: Justin Trudeau or Justin Bieber?—you might want to use as you attend more parties during the holidays.

It’s easier to clear out your Google search history

You probably already know that Google has a record of everything you search on Google.com. And while you can clear your local browser history, you couldn’t do the same for what’s stored on Google’s servers. But now, in a move to make Google users more aware of the control they have in their account, it’s easier to access settings to delete your search history. Through this link, you can choose to delete your search activity from the last hour or all your searches. From there you can even get access to control likes disabling ad personalization or stopping Google sites from saving activity.

These changes are coming first to desktop and mobile web with iOS and Android updates to come in the following weeks. The company has plans to expand these changes in the coming year to services like Maps as the company tries to overhaul its privacy controls. It comes at a time when giant tech companies are under scrutiny for what they’re doing to protect user data.

Source: The Verge