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Everything we know Google is working on for the new year
- acheron 12y agoI've got a crazy guess here: I bet they're working on more ways to show ads.
- tracker1 12y agoGiven their ad sales model, they're working on ways to serve you ads you're more likely to click on.
- brador 12y agoNot just serving ads but finding more ways to trick users into clicking them. Have you seen the late load ad over the number 1 search result they started a few months ago?
- rev_bird 12y agoI'm perpetually torn about this -- on the one hand, the way they want to serve relevant ads is by knowing everything about my life, even if I don't want them to. On the other hand, I'll get really relevant ads. That's kind of nice.
- rrtulsa 12y agoI am much more complex than my search history- I find that "relevance" to me can depend on things as diverse as my current mood. I too am torn because I know that increased relevance means I am giving away more and more of myself- I'm pretty sure that G has no limits in this pursuit of "relevance."
- derekp7 12y agoI hate this so much -- I'll search for some topic, and start getting ads all over the internet related to that topic. Case in point -- a few weeks ago I clicked on an article regarding "Computer Scientist Barbie", and clicked through the Amazon link. Guess how many Barbie advertisements I'm getting now.
- dorfsmay 12y agoUse browser profiles (default in chrome, add multifox in firefox), and delete all cookies regularly on your default profile.
- toddkaufmann 12y agoWhy are you getting ads ? Install adblock and/or ghostery. Fewer distractions, fewer cycles going to adware. I don't see ads in search results or gmail, and not a lot of other places either. Noticeably different on a tablet though, where it doesn't run. At the other extreme is adnauseum, which clicks on every ad link in the background (so you don't have to).
- kbenson 12y agoI don't know about the above commenter, but I have a complex relationship with ads and adblock. I installed it to get around some particularly nauseating behavior of some sites long ago, and largely forgot about it and browsed blissfully unaware of how much it was helping. Then I realized that someone else's Pandora was playing ads, and mine wasn't, it just plays song after song. I felt rather bad about that. This is a well established transactional structure which we are all used to on the radio, songs interspersed with the occasional ad to generate revenue. I feel like I've been stealing from Pandora for a few months now, especially because I've been on the cusp of paying for it for a few months even without the ads. Visual content with visual ads isn't really that different, except that some sites vastly overshoot the expected norm for the ad-inconvenience to content ratio. I think those few bad-actors are to blame for most the current online ad-climate.
- eru 12y ago
- jodrellblank 12y agoThe limit of "really relevant ads" is automatically emptying your wallet and delivering things you "want". Even if you didn't want them until you saw the ad.
- kbenson 12y ago"want" is a superset of "useful/life enhancing" which is itself a superset of "need". We probably know our needs, and getting things we want but don't really help us may not be a good outcome, but discovering things that help us in our lives that we weren't aware of is definitely a good thing. I would like to see more of that.
- jodrellblank 12y agoIt's not necessarily a superset of useful or life enhancing; e.g. an alcoholic and alcohol. The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were. Ad vendors don't want the best for you. They want the most profitable for them. When everything is terrible, improved ads could be good for both - they profit from things you were going to buy anyway. At any other time, discerning individual nuances of your life is difficult and intensive, blanket trying to change what you want instead is much cheaper.
- kbenson 12y ago> It's not necessarily a superset of useful or life enhancing; e.g. an alcoholic and alcohol. Sure it is. "Want" is a superset in that it contains useful/life enhancing things as well as other things that are not that. > The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were. The best case for an ad vendor is to maximize profit from you while minimizing negative outcomes to themselves in doing so. Whether that is maximizing profit over the short term or a longer term, and whether some methods produce more negative outcomes for them (such as public displeasure and possible resulting legislation) is really their decision to make, but I don't think a model as simplistic as what you proposed really covers the reality of the situation. I'm sure mine isn't all that much better though.
- jmathes 12y agoWe try to show ads that people will click on AND THEN buy/use whatever's on the other end. This maximizes advertiser value, long-term Google profit, and user experience all at once. So we're trying to show you ads that you want to see, rather than ads that try to provoke you into clicking (like Buzzfeed articles)
- Jormundir 12y agoMaximized user experience would be no ads.
- gtremper 12y agoNot if price is factored in to the user experience. Plus the small amount of value of discovering something you wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
- sp332 12y agoI'm not at all convinced that's true. I pay for Ars Technica because I want them to have money but I don't want to see ads. Edit: looks like Google might be thinking the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- kbenson 12y agoThat would be awesome. Google's one of the few players with enough clout and reach to make a micropayments system that might actually work, or at least get enough users to see how it would work in practice and work through some of the theoretical hurdles.
- Spearchucker 12y agoThe only ads I ever notice are for things I already have. Everybody pro advertising tells me how good ads are for me. I started using the Internet in 1991 and have yet to see how advertising is good for me. Here are some ways in which ads are bad for me: - Increased operator bandwidth charges (REAL money) - Loss of privacy - Page download performance - Garish web sites - Lost time cleaning up after sites - Being shown ads for products I already own I would happily give more money than I pay my operator to content providers in exchange for no ads.
- passfree 12y agoIt is not about the ads any more. Information is far much more important and they do a fine job at taking over every information stream they can get to. In the long run this will play a huge role.
- higherpurpose 12y agoIf Google wants to offer "Whatsapp competition" in 2015, it should have 2 things, that Hangouts doesn't right now: 1) fast (instant) performance 2) end-to-end encryption (I wouldn't mind if they used the same Axolotl protocol as TextSecure and Whatsapp) If it doesn't have any of those, I won't be using it.
- nostromo 12y ago3) completely independent of Google+
- Pxtl 12y agoI'm still confused why Google+ even exists as a separate component. I mean, I have a Google account. Why doesn't that just automatically include the Google+ infrastructure? Why do I have to enable a service even if I don't use it?
- on_and_off 12y agoprobably because of the back clash against automatic Google+ account creation.
- Pxtl 12y agoAnd one thing Whatsapp does have right now: Support every platform. Not just Android 4 and iOS. You need to go right down to Android 2.3, Windows Phone, Symbian, Blackberry, Nintendo DS, PSP, etc. Even IE6.
- Zigurd 12y agoThis is why platform/ecosystem giants like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google cannot be, and should not try to be WhatsApp. By the time they get there, the battleground will have shifted out from under them.
- stephenr 12y agoThe precursor to hangouts (talk) had the best kind of cross platform support: it was an open standard (xmpp) so you didn't need the official Google app to use it. The major im apps are all built on xmpp base anyway so what's missing is support for any extensions they create and open access for third party clients using standard xmpp protocols
- laxatives 12y agoI've always thought that the Google Ideas projects page was a bit frightening since many of projects are closely tied to defense. https://www.google.com/ideas/projects/ https://www.google.com/ideas/projects/
- foobarqux 12y agoGoogle Ideas is essentially Google's division to collaborate with the state department.
- username223 12y agoGoogle is another "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." What do you expect?
- navytank 12y agoIt doesn't seem to be mentioned directly on the Google Ideas site, but it seems to be Jared Cohen's own project [1], which could explain the defense-themed sub-projects. Interestingly, their last public blog post was in late January [2], and there hasn't seemed to be much public press on what they're doing in a few years. [1] http://www.cfr.org/experts/cybersecurity-iran-technology-and-foreign-policy/jared-cohen/b16451 http://www.cfr.org/experts/cybersecurity-iran-technology-and... [2] https://plus.google.com/+GoogleIdeas/posts https://plus.google.com/+GoogleIdeas/posts
- patrickk 12y agoJulian Assange has some interesting things to say about Jared Cohen: Later that year the two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy. Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,” Schmidt and Cohen claimed that Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. . . . They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world. In the same piece they argued that “this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.” Shortly afterwards, Tunisia. then Egypt, and then the rest of the Middle East, erupted in revolution. Of course, you have to take Assange's word with a pinch of salt, but he does a good job of explaining how Cohen links the State Department to Google senior management. So much for "Don't be evil." https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- amelius 12y agoI see no biotech projects. Kind of strange, because it is a hot field, possibly the next big thing.
- nostromo 12y agoThere's a whole section on biotech: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/5/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-e... Most interesting to me is Calico: http://www.calicolabs.com/ http://www.calicolabs.com/
- xasos 12y agoI'm especially excited for their Google X projects[1] - Google Glass 2, Google X Display, and self-driving cars. If reports[2] are true that the self-driving car will start testing next month, I predict 2015 may be the year that autonomous vehicles go big. The true goals of Lyft and Uber will finally be accomplished. I hope there won't be much red tape getting these cars into action (although there probably will be). [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/6/#h1 http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-e... [2] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-self-driving-car-prototype-2/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-self-driving-car-prototy...
- ams6110 12y agoI think you're at least a decade, more likely two or three, on the optimistic side. But we'll see.
- eru 12y agoDo you think the technological progress will take that long, or do we need the time for the regulation to catch up?
- objclxt 12y agoBoth. It's clear right now that self driving cars can perform very well in ideal conditions. It is considerably less clear that they perform well in poor conditions. I haven't seen any demos of Google's tech in low visibility / high rain, and demos of other tech that I have seen went poorly.
- ghaff 12y agoBoth, also. From a technology perspective, I think a lot of people are greatly underestimating the gap between autonomous vehicles operating under relatively controlled conditions with a human available to take over control within a modest period of time and the general case. I.e., it's easy for me to imagine autonomous cars being possible for highway driving in good weather in the relatively near term. But, unfortunately, I suspect robo-taxis are decades away. And regulations will be slow to change as well, especially to the degree that autonomous vehicles are seen as toys for rich people. One of the issues will be that, even if they really are statistically safer overall than human-driven cars, they will tend to fail in ways that are different. And you can be sure that those different failures will be highly publicized.
- Zigurd 12y agoAra will be a crappy phone. But it will be potentially important to making Android, and perhaps the underlying Linux portable across a a range of instruction sets and SoC architectures, and, of course, a wide range of peripherals.
- bra-ket 12y agothey missed Google Genomics: https://cloud.google.com/genomics/ https://cloud.google.com/genomics/