What’s Cooking at Google This Week

For those who follow our site, you know we cover tech news. And usually, we do one article based on a single topic. However, so much has been happening at Google, we just had to do multiple topics into one big mega-article. Well, here’s to the first one.

Google to Counter ISIS Terrorism

ISIS has been on the spread lately, especially on social media. After Facebook decided to use its suicidal user-flagging system to identify people who show radicalization behavior following meetings with government officials, Google is not too far behind.

The search giant plans to team up with NGOs and other non-profit organizations to allow them to display anti-radicalization advertisements on the Adwords ad spaces whenever someone types a term relating to terrorism or radicalization. The search results won’t be altered in any way. Apart from this, Google plans to give priority to Youtube videos about anti-radicalization and show them more often.

“This year, we are running two pilot programmes. One is to make sure that these types of videos are more discoverable on YouTube. The other one is to make sure when people put potentially damaging search terms into our search engine, they also find this counter narrative. The free Google AdWords Grant program is starting a pilot for a handful of eligible non-profits organizations to run ads against terrorism-related search queries of their choosing,” Google said.

Google Testing Self-Driving Cars in Washington

To us geeks, its common knowledge that 94% of road accidents occur due to human error. No wonder companies like Google are losing so much money (more than $3.5 billion) just to develop self-driving cars. Already, Google’s self-driving cars have completed 1.4 million miles. Taking it a step further, Google plans to test the vehicles in Kirkland, Washington, and vows to have them on the roads by the end of February.

"The hills of the city will allow us to test our sensors at different angles and elevations. Testing in new cities enables our engineers to further refine our software and adapt to these different environments,” Google said.

Google’s Head of Search Leaves to Pursue Philanthropy

A long time (not that long ago), a Googler dreamed of a computer similar to the one in Star Trek. Now, we are so accustomed to the technology that we take it for granted. The person’s name is Amit Singhal, Senior VP of Search at Google, who spearheaded Google Search for almost 15 years.

Singhal will be leaving Google to pursue philanthropy. Taking over will be John Giannandrea, VP of Engineering and A.I.

Google Blocks Samsung’s Ad-Blocking App from Play Store

Google takes ads seriously. It’s no surprise that it has blocked Samsung’s Ad-Blocking extension, Adblock Fast, from the App Store stating that “it violates section 4.4 of the Developer Distribution Agreement.”