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A merry mobile holiday with Google Shopping

In those spare moments between basting the turkey, assembling gingerbread houses, and planning your ugly-sweater party, you might find yourself reaching for your phone to research holiday gifts you still need to buy. You’re not alone: With information readily available at the swipe of a finger, holiday shoppers are doing more research before buying than ever before. Indeed, Black Friday searches containing “best” have more than doubled over the past two years on mobile. People are also scrutinizing products from every angle, including the packaging—mobile watchtime of unboxing videos is equivalent to watching “Love Actually” over 20 million times!

Before you head “over the river and through the woods” to deliver your presents this season, we’re introducing improvements to mobile shopping experiences on Google that’ll help you browse, research, compare, and get the items crossed off your holiday gift list.

What’s hot on the list this year

As always, there's a new crop of gifts climbing the trends chart. Here's a look at popular searches going into Black Friday:

Classic apparel brands like Vans, Canada Goose and Nike Air Jordan Retro 11
Celebrity-backed products like Kevin Durant’s Nike KD 10, Pharrell x adidas and Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty
Gifts for gamers, including Razer phones, Nintendo Switch, and Call of Duty WW2

Get the shopping scoop in a snap

To help you search for gifts on the go, we recently redesigned mobile shopping on Google, bringing more product information to the forefront. Click the “Quick View” button in the Google Shopping ad to preview details like a bigger image, product description, reviews and seller rating—and to see if you can score a good deal by checking if it’s on sale. If you see an item that’s almost perfect but not quite what you want, scroll down to view visually similar or related products underneath, or to discover more products from the same brands or retailers.

More quickly and easily research, compare and narrow down your gift options

We know you’ve got limited time and lots of gifts to buy. Knowing that researching items and comparing prices are two of the most common mobile shopping activities, we recently introduced enhancements to the knowledge panel on Google.com to help you quickly find product photos, videos, reviews, descriptions and more.

To help you further narrow down your options and give you deeper insight into potential purchases, we’re now showing buying guides on Google for broad categories (like sewing machines or coffee grinders).

Also, when you search for a specific product, Google.com now shows you other helpful information, like related items, and allows you to compare reviews, prices and other specs, side by side. And if you’re searching for tech gadgets, we’ll help ensure that you're looking at the latest and greatest. You’ll now see a label alerting you there’s a “newer model available” if you're browsing last year’s product.

Shop by voice with the Google Assistant

As much as we try to plan ahead, procrastination happens. If you find yourself looking for something at the last minute, try using your Google Assistant to see where you can purchase needed items nearby by saying “Ok Google, where can I buy…”, or to get it sent right to your doorstep by saying “Ok Google, buy…”. Heading into the holidays, we see people with a Google Home device—which enables voice shopping with the Google Assistant—are using their voice to most frequently buy or add everyday essentials like paper towels or pet food to their shopping lists. We’re also seeing people using voice to find other types of products to prep for the holidays —including kitchen tools like basting brushes to perfectly glaze those Thanksgiving dishes, toys to slip under the tree, or fuzzy blankets to keep warm by the fireplace.

Whether you’re researching on your phone or shopping with your voice, we wish you happy deal-hunting this holiday season!

Source: Search

The High Five: our searches go on, and on

Turkey, “Titanic” and the pope’s new ride were on our minds this week. Here are a few of the week’s top search trends, with data from the Google News Lab.

Almost time for turkey

As people in the U.S. prepare to gather around the table for Thanksgiving next week, our Thanksgiving insights page has all the trends. Pumpkin pie dominates searches in the U.S., but pecan pie is more popular in the southeast and apple pie is the state favorite in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. A smoked turkey is popular in most states, though some contend it should be roasted, fried or grilled. And Friendsgiving continues to rise in popularity, with searches like “friendsgiving ideas,” “friendsgiving invitations” and “friendsgiving games.”

We’ll never let go

Two decades ago, “Titanic” left an iceberg-sized hole in our hearts, and now it’s coming back to theaters in honor of its 20-year anniversary. In the years since its debut, search interest in “Titanic” reached its highest point globally in April 2012 when Titanic in 3D was released. All this talk of sinking ships made us think about other famous boats—the top searched shipwrecks this week include the Batavia, the Edmund Fitzgerald and the USS Indianapolis.

Hot wheels

The “popemobile” got an upgrade this week. Lamborghini gifted the pope a special edition luxury car, which he decided to auction off for charity. Though the pope is known for his affinity for Fiats, interest in “Pope Lamborghini” zoomed 190 percent higher than “Pope Fiat.” People also searched to find out, “Why did the Lamborghini company give the pope a car?” and “How much does the Lamborghini that they gave the pope cost?”

That’s a foul

Searches for “UCLA basketball players” shot 330 percent higher this week when three players returned home after being arrested for shoplifting while on tour with the team in China. The search queries dribbled in: “How long are the UCLA players suspended for?” “Why did China let the UCLA players go?” and “What were the UCLA players stealing?”

All about the music

With hits like “Despacito” and “Mi Gente” taking over the globe this year, the Latin Grammys last night were a hot ticket. People searched “How to watch the Latin Grammy awards online,” “What time are the Latin Grammy awards on?” and “How does music qualify for a Latin Grammy award?” Of the nominees for Record of the Year, “Despacito,” “Guerra,” and “Felices Los 4” were the most searched.

Source: Search

Identifying credible content online, with help from the Trust Project

Every day approximately 50,000 web pages filled with information come online—ranging from the weird, the wonderful and the wacky to the serious, the subjective, and the spectacular.

With a plethora of choices out there, we rely on algorithms to sort and rank all this information to help us find content that is authoritative and comes from credible sources. A constantly changing web means we won’t ever achieve perfection, but we’re investing in helping people understand what they’re reading by providing visual signposts and labels.

We add clear labelling to stories in Google News (e.g., opinion, local, highly cited, in depth), and over year ago we launched the Fact Check tag globally in Google News and Search. And just recently we added information to our Knowledge Panels to help people get a quick insight into publishers.

Today, we’re announcing a move toward a similar labeling effort by the Trust Project, which is hosted at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The Project, which is funded by Google among others, has been working with more than 75 news organizations from around the world to come up with indicators to help people distinguish the difference between quality journalism and promotional content or misinformation.

In a first step, the Project has released eight trust indicators that newsrooms can add to their content. This information will help readers understand more about what type of story they’re reading, who wrote it, and how the article was put together.

These eight indicators include:

Best Practices: Who funds the news outlet and their mission, plus an outlet’s commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections, and other standards.
Author Expertise: Details about the journalist, including their expertise and other stories they have worked on.
Type of Work: Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis, and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.
Citations and References: For investigative or in-depth stories, access to the sources behind the facts and assertions in a news story.
Methods: For in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.
Locally Sourced: Lets people know that the story has local roots, origin, or expertise.
Diverse Voices: A newsroom’s efforts to bring in diverse perspectives.
Actionable Feedback: A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, and ensuring accuracy.

The publishers involved in this work include the BBC, dpa, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Hearst Television, Mic, La Repubblica, La Stampa, The Washington Post, the New York Times and more. (Photo courtesy of the Trust Project.)

News publishers embed markup from schema.org into the HTML code of their articles and on their website. When tech platforms like Google crawl the content, we can easily parse out the information (such as Best Practices, Author Info, Citations & References, Type of Work). This works like the ClaimReview schema tag we use for fact-checking articles. Once we’ve done that, we can analyze the information and present it directly to the user in our various products.

Our next step is to figure out how to display these trust indicators next to articles that may appear on Google News, Google Search, and other Google products where news can be found. Some possible treatments could include using the “Type of Work” indicator to improve the accuracy of article labels in Google News, and indicators such as “Best Practices” and “Author Info” in our Knowledge Panels.

We believe this is a great first step for the Trust Project and look forward to future efforts as well.

Source: Search

New tools to make your job search simpler

To help the millions of people who turn to Google to start their job search, we worked with leaders across the industry to introduce a new experience earlier this year. Since then, we’ve seen more than 60 percent of employers showing jobs in Search and connected tens of millions of people to new job opportunities.

Now, based on feedback from job seekers, we’re introducing some new features to help make the process more efficient. Directly in Search, you can access salary information for job postings, improved location settings, job application choices, and in a couple of weeks, the ability to save individual jobs.

Salary is an important factor in finding the right job—but by our estimate, this information is missing from over 85 percent of job postings in the U.S. today. So to provide this essential information, we’re showing estimated salary ranges right alongside many jobs, based on the specific job title, location and employer. These are drawn from sources across the web like Glassdoor, PayScale, LinkedIn and more. For those jobs that do have a salary listed, we’ll show a comparison to the estimated range for that job, if available.

Many job seekers tell us they want more control over the geography Google uses to find matching jobs for a search. To help, we’re now adding an easy way for you to tell Google what search area to use when finding jobs that match your query. Just click the “Location” filter, and you’ll see a range of distances, from two miles up to 200 miles or “anywhere” if you’re a bit more flexible. Once you select the distance that works for you, we’ll display postings only from the area you’re interested in—whether that’s walking distance from your home, or across the whole country.

Once you find a job you’re interested in, we want to make it easy for you to apply. However, jobs are often posted in multiple places on the web, and most job seekers have a preference for where they apply. If you’ve already put in the time to build out your professional presence or profile online (on Monster or CareerBuilder, for example), you might prefer to apply to future jobs on that same site. Now when we find the same job in multiple places on the web, we’ll give you a choice of which site you’d like to visit to view the job.

Finally, finding the right job for you can take time. That’s why in a couple of weeks, we’re adding the ability to save jobs right inside Google Search. With a bookmark button alongside each posting, saving is as simple as a single tap. Then that job will appear in your “Saved jobs” tabs on Google, which is accessible across any of your devices.

We all know the job hunt can be stressful, so Google is here to help. We review every piece of feedback we receive (to submit click the “Feedback” button beneath the feature), and we’ll continue to add tools to help make the job search easier for you.

Source: Search

The High Five: Just like the movies—breakfast at Tiffany’s and uniting with wizards

Grab your holiday beverage and check out this week’s trends, with data from the Google News Lab.

It’s that time of year

Starbucks holiday drinks are in full swing (or swig, in this case). People are searching about the “buy one get one free” deal happening this weekend, trying to find out “what drinks are included in the Starbucks BOGO?” and “what time is Starbucks buy one get one free?” Some may be surprised that the fall favorite Pumpkin Spice Latte is missing from the list of most-searched Starbucks drinks this week, which includes hot chocolate, peppermint mocha and flat white.

I’ll take a coffee and a croissant

Starting today, you can actually eat breakfast at Tiffany’s. With the opening of Tiffany and Co.’s “Blue Box Cafe” in New York, people are are searching, “How much would breakfast at Tiffany’s cost,” and “What was Audrey eating in Breakfast at Tiffany’s opening scene?” The most searches are coming from New Yorkers themselves, followed by Holly Golightly fans in New Jersey and Maryland.

Wands Phones at the ready

Where can you find fantastic beasts? In your own backyard (no matter what House you’re in). In 2018 Niantic will debut a Harry Potter augmented reality game called Wizards Unite, in the style of Pokemon Go. The Muggles among us have been searching: “Harry Potter Wizards Unite come out?” and “Is Harry Potter Wizards Unite real?” Harry himself, Hermione Granger and Voldemort were the most-searched characters this week, while Slytherin prevailed over Gryffindor as the most-searched House.

Elle Woods and Rachel Green come together

This week, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston announced they will co-star in and executive produce a series about the lives of two morning TV anchors. Fans are wondering, “What have Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon been in together?” and “Are Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston friends?” Though this latest venture will be a TV series, people are searching for the actresses’ movies this week too. “Just Go With It” was Jen’s most-searched movie, and Reese’s was “Home Again.”

A Little Bit Country

On Wednesday, country music stars came together for the 51st annual CMA awards. Despite Garth Brooks’s lip-sync snafu, fans remained most interested in the winners (search interest in “CMA Award winners” was 520 percent higher than “CMA lip sync”). The most searches for CMA awards came from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama; and Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks and Chris Stapleton were the most searched CMA winners.

Source: Search

Learn more about publishers on Google

As tens of thousands of publishers of all sizes push out content every day, chances are you’ve come across a publication you’re not familiar with or one you wanted to learn more about.

To help in this situation, publisher Knowledge Panels on Google will now show the topics the publisher commonly covers, major awards the publisher has won, and claims the publisher has made that have been reviewed by third parties. These additions provide key pieces of information to help you understand the tone, expertise and history of the publisher.

Today’s additions are a further step toward surfacing useful information based on your search query. This access to relevant and additional context can help you learn more about different sources and which you’d like to read. We’ll continue to refine and improve this experience, and look forward to future updates to keep you in the know about areas of interest. If you’d like to learn more about this new feature, please check out our Help Center.

Source: Search

Skip the line: restaurant wait times on Search and Maps

When it comes to a saucy bowl of pasta or a perfectly cooked steak, people are willing to wait in (long) lines for a taste of their favorite comfort foods. Rolling out soon, wait times on Google Search (and coming soon to Maps) shows you the estimated wait at your favorite restaurants. Now you can decide whether that cronut is really worth an hour wait or plan ahead to get your fix at a time when you can avoid a wait entirely.

To see wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section. There you’ll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. And by tapping on any of the hour bars, you’ll see the estimated wait for that time period. You can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars–so you can plan ahead to beat the crowds.

Wait time estimates are based on anonymized historical data, similar to how we compute the previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features.

Source: Search

The High Five: searches for New York, and other trending topics of the week

Here are a few of the week’s top search trends, with data from the Google News Lab.

Attack in New York

This week people turned to Google for more information about the New York terrorist attack—carried out by a man from Uzbekistan—that claimed the lives of eight victims. Top questions from people around the U.S. were, “What happened in New York?” “Where was the New York terrorist from?” And “Who died in the NYC attack?” Two of the top questions from New Yorkers themselves were: “How to mark yourself as safe on Facebook” and “Where is Uzbekistan located?”

What’s old is new

Approximately 4,500 years after the Pyramid of Giza was built, scientists have discovered a hidden 100-foot space within the Great Pyramid. People in South Dakota, New Mexico and Montana searched the most about the discovery, with top questions like, “Can you go inside the Great Pyramid?” “Which Pharaoh was the Great Pyramid built for?” and “How did the Egyptians build the pyramids?”

Be Prepared

In the circle of life, classic movies get remade. This week, Disney announced the cast of the new live-action “Lion King” movie, and search interest in “The Lion King” rose 1,700 percent. The most searched “Lion King” cast members were Beyoncé, Donald Glover, John Oliver, Keegan-Michael Key and Seth Rogen, while Simba and Pumbaa were the most searched characters.

Having a cow over emoji

A Twitter debate this week proved that some people have beef with Android’s cheeseburger emoji. People grilled Search with these top questions: “What is wrong with the cheeseburger emoji?” “Why is there a cheeseburger emoji?” and “What is the controversy over the cheeseburger emoji?” For those communicating in non-food emoji, the top searched emoji this week were , and .

A little birdie told us …

“The Lion King” isn’t the only comeback in the news this week. Tiger Woods announced he’s returning to golf following his back fusion surgery later this year. People are more interested in his resurgence than his surgery: search interest in “Tiger Woods return” swung 420 percent higher than “Tiger Woods surgery,” with top questions like “When was Tiger Woods’ last tour victory?” and “How many major championships has Tiger Woods won?”

Source: Search

The High Five: searches for an expanding universe

This week’s trends—with data from Google News Lab–have something for everyone: science experts, history buffs, baseball fans, music aficionados and dog lovers.

Mind-expanding, relatively speaking

Stephen Hawking’s doctoral thesis made news this week (and was searched 1,000 percent more than “Stephen Hawking IQ”) when the Cambridge Library made PDF files of the thesis available for download from its website. The document crashed the university’s open-access repository and led to top searches like, “How many pages is Stephen Hawking’s thesis paper?” “What is in Stephen Hawking’s thesis?” and “How to get a copy of Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis.”

That’s a big file cabinet

American history buffs and conspiracy theorists alike waited in eager anticipation for yesterday’s release of the JFK Files, a set of more than 2,800 government files about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. People wanted to know where the files are, what time they were being released, and where to download them—and “JFK Files” were searched nearly 700 percent more than “JFK assassination.”

Next in the lineup, the World Series

The Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Houston Astros in the first two games of the World Series this week. The series may be tied, but the Astros were searched 121 percent more than the Dodgers (the most search interest in the Dodgers comes from the West Coast, where as the Astros have the Midwest and East Coast). Here are the top questions that fans threw out there: “Who won game 2 of the World Series?” “How many World Series have the Dodgers won?” and “When was the last time the Astros won the World Series?”

More like Idita-roid

This week, a doping scandal was uncovered at the Iditarod, the world’s most famous dog race which takes place in Alaska. Several dogs tested positive for Tramadol, an opioid pain reliever. In light of the news, people searched to find more about the race itself: “When was the first Iditarod?” “How many dogs run in the Iditarod?” and “Who won the 2017 Iditarod race?” For those looking for non-doping dogs on the internet, the most-searched breeds this week were pit bull, German shepherd, and golden retriever.

Feeling blue, singing the blues

New Orleans jazz musician Fats Domino died earlier this week at the age of 89. Search interest in the musical legend increased nearly 32,000 percent on the day of his death, with top searches like, “How old was Fats Domino?” “How did Fats Domino die?” and “Which songs did Fats Domino sing?” The most searched Fats Domino songs over the past week were “Blueberry Hill,” “Ain’t that a Shame,” and “Blue Monday.”

Source: Search

Making search results more local and relevant

When you’re searching on Google, we aim to provide the most useful results for your query. Today, around one in five searches on Google is related to location, so providing locally relevant search results is an essential part of serving you the most accurate information.

In order to provide this optimal experience, your location determines the country service you receive results for across Google Search and Maps. Historically, these services have been labeled and accessed via country code top level domain names (ccTLD) such as [google.ng for Nigeria] or [google.com.br for Brazil]. You may also have typed in the relevant ccTLD in your browser.

Today, we’ve updated the way we label country services on the mobile web, the Google app for iOS, and desktop Search and Maps. Now the choice of country service will no longer be indicated by domain. Instead, by default, you’ll be served the country service that corresponds to your location. So if you live in Australia, you’ll automatically receive the country service for Australia, but when you travel to New Zealand, your results will switch automatically to the country service for New Zealand. Upon return to Australia, you will seamlessly revert back to the Australian country service.

If for some reason you don't see the right country when you're browsing, you can still go into settings and select the correct country service you want to receive. Typing the relevant ccTLD in your browser will no longer bring you to the various country services—this preference should be managed directly in settings. In addition, at the bottom of the search results page, you can clearly see which country service you are currently using.

It’s important to note that while this update will change the way Google Search and Maps services are labeled, it won’t affect the way these products work, nor will it change how we handle obligations under national law. This update will help ensure that you get the most relevant results based on your location and is consistent with how Google already manages our services across a number of our other platforms, including YouTube, Blogger, Google Earth and Gmail, among others.

We’re confident this change will improve your Search experience, automatically providing you with the most useful information based on your search query and other context, including location.