Jaikumar Vijayan

Starting Jan. 10, 2017, Google will penalize websites that serve up intrusive interstitials, or pop-up ads, to users searching for content on mobile devices. Websites and web pages that use such pop-ups will rank lower in Google’s mobile search results after that date, the company announced this week. The move is designed to make it […]

Google has begun rolling out Android 7.0 Nougat, the newest version of its mobile operating system. In keeping with the usual schedule for such rollouts, Google’s family of Nexus devices will receive the new OS in the next few days and weeks. Owners of Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C and […]

Google will end support for Chrome applications on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms over the next two years. Starting in early 2018, users of packaged and hosted Chrome apps will no longer be able to run them on these platforms. Google will, however, continue to support all types of Chrome apps on Chrome OS for […]

Google’s cloud platform group this week announced general availability of Cloud Bigtable, a fully managed database service capable of handling petabyte- scale workloads. The announcement was one of three from the Cloud Platform Group this week. Google this week also announced general availability of its Cloud Datastore managed NoSQL database service and talked up its […]

Users of Google Street View soon will see substantial improvements in the quality of the panoramic images that are viewable via the application. Google has rolled out a new Street View renderer for the JavaScript API in Google Maps that the company says addresses several shortcomings in the old renderer such as jerky transitions and […]

A Russian court rejected Google’s appeal of a lower court finding in an antitrust case involving the company’s Android bundling practices. The decision by Moscow’s Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal leaves intact a judgment by the country’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) earlier this month ordering Google to pay a fine of $6.7 million and to […]

Individuals and groups planning on using Google Hangouts On Air to live-stream content to audiences around the world had better hurry. Those wishing to schedule new Hangouts, take note: Google announced Aug. 15 that it is moving the video-streaming service to YouTube Live from Google+ effective Sept. 12. New live-stream events cannot be scheduled on […]

Google has begun work on a brand-new open-source operating system called Fuchsia. From the few details that are publicly available on it on the GitHub code repository, Fuchsia will be completely different from Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems. Fuchsia appears to be targeted at smartphones, high-end PCs featuring fast processors and large amounts of […]

The same week that authorities in Russia slapped Google with a $6.8 million fine for its Android bundling practices in the country, regulators in South Korea have opened an investigation against the company for what appears to be the same reason. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) is looking at whether Google’s business practices are […]

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has fined Google the equivalent of $6.8 million for violating the country’s fair competition laws. The fine comes about one year after the FAS opened its investigation against Google and represents mixed news for the company. One the one hand, the penalty suggests that regulators in the many countries where […]

Google has rolled back prices on its so-called preemptible virtual machines by up to 33 percent in an apparent bid to spur broader enterprise interest in its cloud machines by up computing services. The new pricing is already in force and in some instances makes it up to 80 percent cheaper for enterprises to sign […]

Google’s cloud platform technologies will form the basis of a soon-to-be-launched Clinical Genomics Service from Stanford Medicine. The service will give clinicians and medical researchers at Stanford a way to analyze massive genomic data sets to diagnose certain diseases more quickly and efficiently than possible currently. The two organizations this week announced a partnership under […]