Google Answers Complicated Questions

Google used to only answer simple questions like "who's the prime minister of Canada?" or "what's the population of China?". Thanks to the Knowledge Graph project, Google can answer more complicated questions like "who played Batman?", "what's the latest album of Celine Dion?", "what are the main attractions in Spain?".



Now Google shows direct answers for even more complex questions. Here's an example of question that doesn't have a definitive answer: "what's the distance between Earth and Mars?". I picked a shorter version of the query: "distance to the Mars." Google shows a snippet from a page that answers the question and highlights the distances.

Google also answers: "how many work days in a year?", "who owns Lancia?", "who ended world war 2?", "who celebrates presidents day?", "how many countries are there?".

The answers aren't always accurate and sometimes they're incomplete (Will Smith has three kids):

Adobe Photoshop Express Gets A Powerful Makeover For Android KitKat

Adobe has released a new version of the free Photoshop Express for Android. The updated app has been designed from scratch with enhanced performance in tune with the new KitKat version of the operating system. Adobe’s new and faster image rendering engine powers the app in Android’s latest version. The face of the app also gets a more user-friendly refresh. Users might notice the more powerful image rendering engine under the hood. Accessing and processing images saved on the SD card is now faster than before. The added power also makes handling larger file sizes easier. On the design front...

Read the full article: Adobe Photoshop Express Gets A Powerful Makeover For Android KitKat

Keep It Simple, Stupid: 7 No-Fuss Online Tools For The Lazy Blogger

Blogging can be a pain in the butt when it comes to management. Hosting your own blog has its perks — flexibility and customization — but it could prove troublesome if you don’t have much technical knowledge. Plus, self-hosting a blog requires renting server space. What if you don’t want to deal with any of that? For a while, if you wanted to blog for free you were stuck between WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a few other alternatives that weren’t so good. Nowadays, you have an ocean of free blogging platforms that will serve you well depending on what you...

Read the full article: Keep It Simple, Stupid: 7 No-Fuss Online Tools For The Lazy Blogger

Keep It Simple, Stupid: 7 No-Fuss Online Tools For The Lazy Blogger

Blogging can be a pain in the butt when it comes to management. Hosting your own blog has its perks — flexibility and customization — but it could prove troublesome if you don’t have much technical knowledge. Plus, self-hosting a blog requires renting server space. What if you don’t want to deal with any of that? For a while, if you wanted to blog for free you were stuck between WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a few other alternatives that weren’t so good. Nowadays, you have an ocean of free blogging platforms that will serve you well depending on what you...

Read the full article: Keep It Simple, Stupid: 7 No-Fuss Online Tools For The Lazy Blogger

Have You Upgraded To Windows 8.1? [MakeUseOf Poll]

Last week we wanted to know how much free space you’ve managed to get on your Dropbox account. Through referrals, games, and various promotions, it seems that most of you did a pretty good job at going over the minimum 2 GB allotted by Dropbox. But if you thought 50 GB was a huge amount of free space to have, you’re in for a surprise. A total of 1,032 readers voted in this poll. These were the results: 1% of you have a paid Dropbox account, while 2% don’t use Dropbox at all. That means 98% of the readers who...

Read the full article: Have You Upgraded To Windows 8.1? [MakeUseOf Poll]

A Google Experiment Hides Knowledge Graph Sidebar

Google has an experiment that hides the Knowledge Graph sidebar, so it no longer shows information about famous people, companies, plants, cars, movies, books and more.

To try this experiment, install a cookie manager extension like "Edit This Cookie" for Chrome or Cookies Manager+ for Firefox, go to google.com and change the value of the NID cookie to:



67=Pj2b01uyf7hJnPvNoPECEnzlbCoXch_13GxuSVeSSyRdm_irfKzVaizXIE5svj3Qw1985iU4waenQh_Qy-BrE4WOtZ5Zoz9T4Kl1e1DtwJL4Xy0-JBcW_Z9IOKdd1H5Z

If you use "Edit This Cookie", don't forget to click "Submit changes". Delete the NID cookie to opt-out from the experiment.

{ Thanks, Rubén. }

Google Hides Too Many Search Results

This is a strange bug. For many navigational queries, Google only returns about 100 search results and shows a message like this: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 117 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If you click the link, you'll be sent back to the first page of results and you'll be able to see more than 100 results (but not 1000). You can also add "&filter=0" to the search URL.

While the duplicate filter is not new, it was used to hide results that were redundant (for example: the same press release published by multiple sites). It's hard to believe that Google can't find more than 117 relevant results for [Google], 120 results for [Facebook] or 75 results for [Yahoo].

When you search for [Yahoo], Google returns a lot of results from yahoo.com and Google's duplication filter stops showing results because they appear to be redundant. There's a conflict between two opposite principles: showing diverse results and showing many results from the most relevant sites.



Here's a page of almost identical search results that probably triggered the filter:

Another issue is that there are many spam pages, irellevant results and pages in foreign languages. Here are some examples for [Amazon]:

Google needs to fix this bug and show more diverse results.



{ Thanks, Joren. }