Google, Technology | featured news

Back in the day, watching television was as simple as hitting a switch, maybe messing with some rabbit ears and flipping through all eight of your channel choices. The sound wasn't so great, and the picture was kind of grainy, but at least it was simple.

Modern Web standards are taking gaming on the Web to the next level. We took a brief look at how Mozilla and Google are contributing to the effort. Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

Google+ has been called a "ghost town," a "little version of Facebook" and "dead" since its launch last year. Users have continually questioned what it is and why they would want to use it. Google's senior vice president of social business, Vic Gundotra, attempted to rebut critics' claims during a panel at South by Southwest on Friday and defended Google+ against allegations that users are fleeing a stagnant service. Traffic has declined more than 30 percent in the past four months, according to one estimate.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 for public testing on Wednesday in the hope that it will help the brand win back some of the ground it has been losing to Apple and Google.

On Thursday, Google's much-discussed new privacy policy goes into effect.

With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.”

Everyone’s heard the expression: Job searching is a full time job. But it isn’t until you find yourself sitting in front of a laptop, eating take-out, and scrolling job sites night after night that you realize how much of your life becomes consumed by the search. It takes time to find the right position. And yes, it’s a lot of work. But, like anything, there are things you can do to make it a little easier on yourself.

Google recently announced it was unifying its privacy policies and would be sharing the data it collects about users between all of its products, starting March 1st. That means your web searches and sites you visit will be combined with other Google products like Google Plus and YouTube. If you'd rather avoid that, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us you can remove your Google search history and stop it from being recorded.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.