Since Google decided to go all in on AI, more and more search engine users have been looking for “no AI” alternatives. As a result, visits to DuckDuckGo’s No AI search engine have been on the rise — which is perhaps a little ironic, because the DuckDuckGo browser was the first to add an AI image filter.

DuckDuckGo No-AI strips away AI answers, images, and feature suggestions, sending you back to simpler times. Does that mean the results are poorer? Not at all. In fact, using a few hacks puts you in total control, getting you exactly what you need, faster.

Here are 6 quick hacks to get the most out of your No-AI searches.

• How to use DuckDuckGo: Everything you need to know
• I just tried DuckDuckGo’s new anonymous AI photo editor and it’s a game changer
• How to change default browser on Windows, macOS, Android and iPhone

Update: Google is aware and working on a fix

At Google I/O 2026, the tech giant revealed the biggest update to Google Search in over 25 years that pushes AI into everything. It's a move that appears poised to transform how the internet has worked for decades.

As my colleague Amanda Caswell wrote, "the internet increasingly feels like something else entirely: one giant conversation happening inside a single AI response box.

What was unexpected is that it looks like Google's AI is also breaking Search itself. Google's controversial AI Overviews appear to be breaking when you use known AI commands like "disregard", "dismiss", and "ignore."

We first started noticing social media posts about the issue where people found searching "disregard" doesn't show the definition of the word. Instead, it says things like "No problem at all. If you have any other questions, let me know."

This is what AI bots tend to do when you're telling it do something instead.

As a reminder, part of the Google Search overhaul involves turning Search into an Gemini-powered AI chatbot that can build you an interactive website, set your calendar, and more.

It's a mixed bag

Several people on Tom's Guide and myself tried searching the known AI prompt words and it's an inconsistent experience.

For myself, on desktop, I have yet to get the broken AI overview. However, when I tried it on my phone, disregard broke the feature but ignore and dismiss didn't.

Tom's Guide U.S. editor in chief Mike Prospero found the words borked the overview in AI Mode including the new words "cancel" and "stop." AI Mode told him "No problem. I've stopped the current action."

My colleage Tony Polanco noted a problem on his work account but his personal one didn't have any issues.

Obviously, not everyone is just searching AI prompts in Google, but plenty of people utilize the built-in dictionary feature as a habit. On the whole, you probably won't run into this issue.

However, it does show the flaws in Google turning over Search functions to AI, especially after the original AI Overview controversies when it was introduced in 2025. Just a month ago, a study found that AI overviews are wrong 1 in 10 times, and could be even worse.

Tom's Guide has reached out to Google for clarity on the issue and I was told that Google knows.

“We’re aware that AI Overviews are misinterpreting some action-related queries, and we’re working on a fix, which will roll out soon," a spokesperson said.

They clarified that it appears to be an issue with how AI Overview interprets certain queries, and were keen to say that it's not related to the new Search tools announced at I/O this week.

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Google's AI Overviews have seemingly made searching faster and more convenient (depending on who you ask) — but they've also created a new opportunity for scammers.

Rather than showing a list of links you evaluate yourself, AI Overviews present synthesized information as confident, authoritative fact. Most of the time that's fine. But when scammers deliberately plant false information into the sources AI scrapes, the results can be genuinely dangerous — and people are already falling victim to exactly this kind of fraud.

How scammers exploit AI Overviews

AI Overviews scrape information from across the web and present it as verified fact. The problem is that AI can't reliably distinguish between legitimate information and deliberate misinformation. Scammers exploit this by publishing fake customer service numbers across multiple low-profile websites, forums and comment sections alongside the names of major banks, airlines, and tech companies.

Google's AI scrapes these planted numbers, sees them associated with a company name in multiple places, and presents them as legitimate contact information. People are calling these numbers expecting a real company, and instead they're reaching a scammer ready to extract account details, passwords or payment information.

Banks and credit unions are already warning customers not to trust phone numbers from AI search results, and reports of these scams have appeared across socials, including Reddit.

Can you disable AI Overviews?

Currently, there's no official way to turn off AI Overviews in Google Search. If Google decides to serve them for your query, they appear at the top of results whether you want them or not. These overviews are central to where Google is taking search, and they're unlikely to offer a simple opt-out anytime soon.

There are some workarounds, though. Adding "&udm=14" to the end of a Google search URL forces traditional search results without AI Overviews. You can also use a browser extension like Slop Evader for Chrome that automatically strips AI Overviews from results.

For now, the safest approach is treating AI Overviews as a starting point rather than a definitive answer, scrolling past them for anything involving specific facts, contact details, or sensitive information, and always verifying what you find through official sources.

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'Tis the season for wrap-ups, as Google just announced its Year in Search 2025 to show us what the world's been searching for, alongside listening to on Spotify or watching on YouTube.

You can see a small selection of highlights in the accompanying The Keyword blog post, but the dedicated site is well worth playing around with, so you can learn what's happening on a global or regional basis in detail. But let's take a quick look at the overall results to take the pulse of the world's Googlers through the past year.

Looking at the global stats, the top overall searches this year were for India's big cricket matches against England and Australia, the newly announced Club World Cup rugby tournament, assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk and, at the top, rather conveniently for Google — its own Gemini AI platform.

Tech topics like Deepseek AI and the iPhone 17 also appear in the top 10, but Gemini being number one seems wild to me. Given how many Google apps and services now offer direct access to Gemini features, it seems weird that so many people would still be searching for it. I can only assume this volume of searches is from people looking for hints and tips, but even still, I'm keeping my tinfoil hat nearby in case of emergency.

Kirk's assassination also led the top of news-related searches, followed by queries on Iran, the U.S. Government Shutdown, the election of Pope Leo XIV and the LA Fires. And accordingly, Kirk's death was one of the most searched passings of the year, with Ozzy Osbourne, Hulk Hogan, Michelle Trachtenberg and Diane Keaton filling up the rest.

The Pope was among the top five people searched this year, with Tyler Robinson (suspected of Charlie Kirk's assassination), Jimmy Kimmel, Kendrick Lamar and d4vd (musician and a person of interest in an LAPD murder investigation) ranking higher.

Most-searched movies, shows, games and more

Moving from current affairs to hobbies and interests, Google's results tell us that Mikey Madison is the most searched-for actor of the year. That seems inevitable when you see that it's "Anora," the movie in which she starred, that sits at number one for cinematic searches, impressively beating "Superman" and the "Minecraft Movie" to the top spot.

In music, the words to DtMF by Bad Bunny were this year's most sought-after lyrics, although the power of Taylor Swift will not be denied, as she claimed spots five to eight with songs from her latest album, Life of a Showgirl. And on TV (or at least streaming services), it was "Monster: The Ed Gein Story" that claims the crown, with lead actor Charlie Hunnam coming in sixth in top searches for individual stars.

We see in the Sport category that boxer Terence Crawford was this year's most popularly searched athlete, with golfer Rory McIlroy coming second. Soccer teams Paris Saint-Germain and S.L. Benfica were the most sought-after teams, while the FIFA World Cup for soccer and the Asia Cup cricket tournaments were apparently the most popular events in the 2025 sporting calendar.

Meanwhile in the gaming world, Arc Raiders was the top-searched title of the year, followed by Battlefield 6, Strands (yep, the NYT puzzle), Split Fiction and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. For food, hot honey was the top trend, with Marry Me Chicken in second being the top-ranked dish. Special shout-out to the alarming-sounding "lasagna soup" in sixth place — I'll definitely be looking up what the heck that is later.

The Hum to Search trending songs are all recognizable if you've spent any time on TikTok or Instagram Reels this year. The top five consists of Golden by HUNTR/X (from the animated smash hit "KPop Demon Hunters"), Ordinary by Alex Warren, PASSO BEM SOLTO by ATLXS, Anxiety by Doechii and Pretty Little Baby by Connie Francis.

We can also see some trending locations from around the world in Google Maps. So congratulations go to Livraria Lello from Porto, Portugal; Kyoto Station in Japan; and the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Karnataka, India for being the number one bookstore, public transport station and botanical garden this year.

The impact of AI

Other than Gemini being the most searched term on Google this year (again, very convenient, Google), the blog post details how users have changed the way they search the internet due to the AI alterations made to Google Search.

Queries starting with "What's the deal with…", "Tell me about…" or "How do I..." have all seen increases in the past year — a big change from the keyword-driven way Google has usually been used in previous years. It's way too soon to know if this is going to be a trend that sticks around, or fundamentally changes the way Google finds and displays results going forward, but it's just as fascinating as the top ten rankings we went through above.

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I’ve noticed that Google’s AI Overviews show up on almost every search I make, automatically generating AI-written answers right at the top of the results page. Google says this makes finding information faster, but in my experience it’s not always accurate and massively hinders the browsing experience.

Unfortunately there’s no official switch to turn AI Overviews off completely, but I’ve found three reliable workarounds that can help you cut down or remove them from your searches. Some are quick fixes you can add on the fly, while others offer a more permanent setup in your browser.

Here’s how I’ve managed to dial back AI Overviews and get back to a cleaner, more traditional Google search experience.

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Why should you add Tom's Guide as a preferred source?

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Just over a year after a federal judge declared that Google is a monopoly in a landmark antitrust case, penalties have been handed down, though Google has been spared the breakup that the government had been seeking.

There was some expectation that the ruling handed down today (September 2) would force Google to divest various parts of its business including selling Chrome or separating Android from Google. That's not what happened, though Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did impose some penalties.

As part of the ruling, Google must share some of its search data with companies that are "qualified competitors." Specifically, Google has to share search index and user interaction data, though it doesn't have to share advertising data.

Mehta also called for the creation of a technological oversight committee that is supposed to monitor Google's compliance with the ruling for the next six years.

Additionally, Mehta restricted Google's ability to enter into exclusive contracts for distributing its search engine. The company is still able to pay for distribution of its search and AI products. This means that Google could still pay $20 billion a year to Apple for making Google Search the provider on Safari, as long as the deal isn't exclusive.

The Department of Justice argued that Google should be forced to sell its Chrome web browser as a way to remedy the company's power as a monopoly.

“Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility,” said Judge Mehta in the decision. “This court has done so.”

Mehta noted in his ruling that AI had upended the tech world since the lawsuit launched in 2020 and that factored in his decision.

Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of browser maker DuckDuckGo, said that the ruling did not go far enough to force the changes needed to Google's behavior. "Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including in AI search," Weinberg said in a statement received by Tom's Guide. "As a result, consumers will continue to suffer. We believe Congress should now step in to swiftly make Google do the thing it fears the most: compete on a level playing field."

How did we get here

This is not necessarily the end of the lawsuit, as Google could appeal the ruling. For now, the landmark case is one of the first major attempts to tackle technology monopolies since US v Microsoft in 1998.

The Department of Justice filed the antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020 arguing that the exclusive agreements with companies like Apple and Samsung was monopolistic and kept out competitors.

Mehta ruled that Google was a monopoly in 2024 with the case entering the remedies phase this past April. During this phase, Google agreed to halt the exclusive contracts but fought back on every other point including the forced sale of Chrome and sharing data.

Google argued that doing so would harm the company, reduce innovation and basically act as a free handout to competitors. However, as of this writing, even with the rise of OpenAI and its improved AI-based search, Google has nearly 90% of the search engine market according to GS Statcounter.

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Recently Meta announced that it will be ending its fact-checking program on social media, instead relying on users to do that job for them — much like Community Notes on Twitter/X. Now Google (via Axios) has apparently decided fact-checking is optional as well, and won’t be complying with an upcoming fact-checking law in the EU.

It’s worth pointing out that Google has never actually offered any fact-checking services. So this is essentially just business as usual for the search giant. According to a letter acquired by Axios, it has privately signaled to EU lawmakers that it won’t be changing its practices, despite the pressure of upcoming legislation.

Originally this fact-checking requirement was implemented by the European Commission as a voluntary set of “self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation” — called the Code of practice on Disinformation. However they are set to become mandatory in the future, as part of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

These rules would force Google to incorporate fact-checked results in search and on YouTube. The algorithm would also need to be changed to incorporate fact-checking into Google’s ranking system — presumably so sites with a history of misinformation get deprioritized compared to those that stick to the facts.

The letter came from Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker, informing the Commission that it does not intend to comply with the rules. In fact, Google will pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct. Because, apparently, fact-checking integration "simply isn't appropriate or effective for [their] services"

Instead Google will double down on its current content moderation practices, which is less about correcting misinformation and more about giving them more information. Those methods include Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosure on YouTube videos, as well as the site’s new user-generated contextual notes feature — something Walker claims has “significant potential”.

We don’t know what the EU’s response to this letter is right now, but I can’t see Google’s decision going down very well. As we’ve seen over the past several years the EU is not afraid to try and hold tech companies accountable for breaking the law. So we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. Popcorn buckets at the ready.

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Microsoft really wants you to use Bing to find stuff on the web, but users seem to really want to use Google to find websites and other content. So, it appears Microsoft has landed on a new trick to get people to use its tool: when you search for Google on Bing, the results page changes to look more like Google's famous white website. Which could be read as trying to spoof some users into thinking they're on Google.

If you look at your address bar, you can see that you're still on Bing, but it would be easy to fall for this trick if you're not paying attention. Thankfully, searching on Bing instead of Google won't make anything bad happen to your computer, except for getting different results than you might be used to.

To trigger the Google result, you must use Bing without logging into a Microsoft account (as first noted by WindowsLatest). The Google result has a search bar, an image that looks suspiciously like a Google Doodle, and even some tiny text under the bar, creating a Google-like design.

The correct results appear under the Google-like search bar, so you can still get to Google through Bing if you want. Or you could just type Google.com into your address bar to avoid unnecessary steps.

For its part, Google seems to be taking Microsoft's new tactic in stride. Google's Parisa Tabriz said in an X post, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Microsoft spoofing the Google homepage is another tactic in its long history of tricks to confuse users & limit choice,” says Tabriz. “New year; new low Microsoft."

This is far from the first time Microsoft has tried to trick users away from Google. In fact, The Verge is cataloging every tactic the company has used over the years, and it's a long list. Some highlights include modifying Chrome download sites, injecting polls into Chrome download pages and more.

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There are times when you don’t want to search the entire web but simply need to find content within a specific website. Perhaps you want to see what coverage Tom’s Guide has given to Netflix or the PlayStation 5, or maybe you’re looking for a particular news story on one newspaper’s website.

You can usually do this by launching the website and using its built-in search engine, but what if you’re not getting effective results or the site doesn’t have a search function? Well, you may be surprised to learn you can ask a search engine to only look for results from a specific domain.

Doing this saves heaps of time and prove more effective. One thing’s for sure, once you’ve learned this trick, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it. Here we show you how it’s done, using a very simple five-letter command.

How to quickly find search results within a specific website

Learn a very simple command and you’ll be in more control over a search engine’s results.

How to restrict search results to one website using DuckDuckGo

It’s worth pointing out that DuckDuckGo has another way of restricting results.

And there you go. You now know how to restrict search results to a single website. But there’s more you can do. Why not discover how to use the Google web filter to bring back old search results or discover how to access archived pages in Google. You can also find out how to do a reverse image search using Google.

Google was dealt a legal blow in its antitrust lawsuit with the U.S. government, when the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, determined that the tech giant had violated the Sherman Act. At the time, Mehta declared, "Google is a monopolist."

There was much speculation on how the Department of Justice would respond to the ruling with many suspecting that the DOJ would seek to break up Google.

That may actually come to fruition as Bloomberg reports that the DOJ is going to ask Judge Mehta to force Google to sell off several parts of the company including its Chrome browser. Other recommendations from antitrust officials include recommending the judge "impose data licensing requirements."

If Mehta accepts the DOJs proposals, it could radically alter not only the internet and search but also the AI industry.

The DOJ's Recommendations

Alongside selling off Chrome, the Department of Justice has several proposals coming. One is to force Google to remove the Android operating system from other products, including search and the Google Play Mobile app store.

Google spent years and billions of dollars on exclusive contracts, such as competitors like Apple to maintain its status as the most dominant browser on both phones and browsers. Those contracts helped block search engines like Microsoft's Bing or DuckDuckGo from gaining bigger toeholds in the search engine world. Google has over 90% of search traffic with competitors barely reaching 6% combined.

Having such a dominant position is boon for Google's ad business and enables the company to leverage search in its AI products like Gemini, which is constantly evolving.

An additional proposal would require Google to share more information with advertisers and hand them control over where these ads appear. It would also ban the exclusive contracts the company used to gain its dominant position.

Specifically regarding Search, the antitrust enforcers propose that either Google sell the "click and query" data and syndicate its search results separately. Currently, Google sells highly restricted access to its syndicated search results with restrictions, like preventing their use on mobile. By opening this up, it could help rivals improve or let people build their own search indexes.

How we got here

The case, which was filed during the first Trump presidency in 2020, continued throughout President Joe Biden's administration. It's unclear based on Trump's current cabinet picks and alleged goals for his return to the office if this next administration will continue the lawsuit and enforce it, or simply leave it alone.

Either way, this is a landmark case with the biggest attempt to rein in giant of technology since the government attempted to break up Microsoft over 20 years ago.

Of course, Google strenuously disagrees with the DOJ's stance. Google's vice president of regulatory affairs told Bloomberg that the Justice Department, “continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case.” She went on, "the government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”

The actual trial lasted for 10 weeks in the fall of 2023 with closing remarks happening in May of 2024, with Mehta's decision coming in August. Currently, the judge has set a two-week hearing in April on how Google must remedy its monopolistic behavior. A final ruling is expected in August of 2025.

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Google is bringing AI to their Google Shopping feature in Search. The biggest new feature is a personalized feed. The new feature, announced by Google in a blog post, will appear on shopping.google.com. 

Google says it is combining its shopping tool with Google Gemini AI models. 

With the new shopping page, you'll see a carousel of products you've searched for in Google Shopping. Scroll down the feed, and eventually, Google will start putting recommended products and related videos. Google says they are pulling from your search history and watching YouTube videos to create the recommendations feed.

To help curate the feed, Google offers thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons on every item. You can tap the down button to prevent similar items from showing up in the feed. It's similar to other algorithmic "For You" feeds on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. 

"Shopping is personal — that’s why the new Google Shopping home page has a personalized feed to inspire you with shoppable products and videos based on your preferences," writes Sean Scott, VP and GM of Consumer Shopping for Google.

Additionally, Google offers a personalized deals tab to showcase products tailored to your algorithm's interests.

Since everything AI is obsessed with summaries, Google adds AI-generated summaries with tips. You'll see products under a "top recommendations" head with an AI blurb explaining why you should consider each product. The pulls will be sourced from reviews and articles based on the products.

In their example, Scott searches for a winter jacket with the feed providing recommendations based on the climate of the Pacific Northwest. From there, you can filter by size, color or availability near you.

If you scroll to the bottom of the feed, you'll see the usual catalog of results that was previously shown on Google Shopping.

As with many Google updates, the overhauled AI shopping is rolling out on mobile and desktop "over the coming weeks, starting today."

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Google is teaming up with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to create technology that looks to identify whether an image was taken with a camera, edited by programs like Photoshop or produced by generative AI models like Google's own Gemini model. 

As part of the technology, Google Search results will get a new "about this image feature" that informs you how an image was created or edited. 

Google outlined the coming tools in a blog post, and the company outlined the system that comes with C2PA. The Coalition is a group dedicated to addressing misinformation and AI-generated images. The group has created an authentication technical standard that includes information about the origination of the content to create a digital trail. 

The standard has been backed by some major companies investing in the AI space, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Adobe. So far, the adoption of the standard hasn't taken off. However, Google incorporating the standard into search results will be the first big test for the standard.

Google says it collaborated on the newest version of the standard (2.1) and will combine it with an upcoming C2PA trust list. The trust list allows Google Search to confirm the origin of the images. 

"For example, if the data shows an image was taken by a specific camera model, the trust list helps validate that this piece of information is accurate," explains Laurie Richardson, Google's VP of Trust & Safety.

The authentication credentials come from two specific Google products: Search and Ads. 

"Our goal is to ramp this up over time and use C2PA signals to inform how we enforce key policies,” says Richardson. “We’re also exploring ways to relay C2PA information to viewers on YouTube when content is captured with a camera, and we’ll have more updates on that later in the year.”

Other AI companies have joined with the C2PA to add the credential from the jump. These include OpenAI, which joined the coalition in May of this year. Runway, which just signed a massive deal with Lionsgate, launched C2PA credentials in the third generation of its AI video generation. 

"Establishing and signaling content provenance remains a complex challenge, with a range of considerations based on the product or service," says Richardson. "And while we know there’s no silver bullet solution for all content online, working with others in the industry is critical to create sustainable and interoperable solutions."

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After killing off cache links in February, Google has seemingly reversed course by teaming up with the Internet Archive to showcase older versions of websites in search results. 

As of today (September 11), Google now puts direct links to cached versions of websites in Search via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (h/t Gizmodo).

With the ever-evolving internet, URLs and links are always changing. Articles, like this one, can get a simple edit, or people try to remove content. Other times websites just go away or someone stops paying hosting fees. For much of the last 30 years, Google has offered a way for you to see older versions of websites in a stripped-down and archived format.

When Google removed its caching feature in February, Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan said in a tweet, "Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

However, Sullivan did go on to say that he hoped Google would add links from the Internet Archive within the "About This Result" section in Searches.

"Personally, I hope that maybe we'll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It's such an amazing resource," Sullivan added.

He didn't make any promises at the time but someone at the Internet Archive or Google — or both — was listening because it has come to pass. 

The Internet Archive laid out how the new caching feature works in a blog post. Now, when you search, there will be three dots which brings up the "About This Result" panel. In that panel is a section called "More About This Page" where you'll find Wayback Machine pages for the website. The Wayback Machine page gives you a sort of static timelapse of how a webpage has looked at various points in time.

Google confirmed the change to 9to5Google. In a statement the company said, "We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through Search."

It's a welcome move, and the Internet Archive seems excited for the opportunity. A nice win for them after the non-profit lost a copyright lawsuit regarding the group's digital lending library last week.

“For more than 25 years, [the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine] been preserving snapshots of the public web," Wayback Machine director Mark Graham said in the Internet Archive post. "This digital time capsule transforms our ‘now-only’ browsing into a journey through internet history. And now, it’s just a click away from Google search results, opening a portal to a fuller, richer web—one that remembers what others have forgotten.”

Going forward, more websites are going to die and others will decay from disuse. Archiving is important not just for information but also seeing how the web has evolved as entire cultures are living and dying in digital-only spaces. This at least gives us one way to remember.

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Less than a month after Google lost a landmark case where a federal judge ruled Google is an illegal monopolist, the crowd-sourced review company Yelp is bringing their own antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant. 

It's clear that the recent court loss has emboldened the longtime Google critic, as Yelp's claim states that the search company "abuses its illegal monopoly in general search to engage in anticompetitive conduct, including self-preferencing its own inferior local product, to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets," according to Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur.

He goes on, "By willfully engaging in exclusionary, anticompetitive conduct, Google has driven traffic and revenue away from competitors, made it harder for them to scale, and increased their costs, while degrading consumer choice, to grow its own market power."

In their claim, Yelp is demanding the courts order Google to halt their alleged anticompetitive behavior and to pay damages. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco today (August 28) in the same Northern District of California of California where a jury previously found Google to be an illegal monopoly via its app store late last year. That antitrust suit was filed by Epic Games in that company's ongoing battles against locked app stores from companies like Apple and Google.

Almost immediately after Google lost the federal suit, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told The New York Times that the decision "is a watershed moment. This is the time to have the conversation, this is the time to correct past wrongs."

Yelp has long been a vocal critic of Google for well over a decade, and over the years Yelp representatives have complained about Google using Yelp reviews in Google products without compensating Yelp appropriately. The company has filed complaints against Google in the EU and testified against Google in antitrust hearings in 2020.

"Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a blog post. "With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages."

You can read Yelp's full complaint here.

It should be noted that D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta narrowed the antitrust case against Google in August of last year. CNBC reported that Mehta threw out claims from state attorney generals that Google purposefully instituted search result bias against third-party narrow search companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Google Search has been, arguably, getting worse in recent years with a focus on Google preferred results that have forced many companies into Gordian SEO knots. Perhaps this lawsuit forces Google to put work into Search that they haven't done in years.

Google provided a previous FTC investigation that concluded that "the evidence presented at this time does not support the allegation that Google’s display of its own vertical content at or near the top of its search results page was a product design change undertaken without a legitimate business justification."

Of course, that investigation concluded in 2013. Ten years is a long time for Google Search to change and shift into a potential problem or deficiency. 

Not to be outdone, Yelp's own internal search results shove miles of sponsored results before providing useful answers.

If Google were to also lose this lawsuit, it could force the company to change how it indexes results from companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Though we won't see the fallout for some time. 

In the case of Epic vs Google, it opens up the door for non-Google app stores on Android without restrictions, including support for storefronts with their own internal billing. 

Google responds

A Google spokesperson told Tom's Guide, "Yelp’s claims are not new. Similar claims were thrown out years ago by the FTC, and recently by the judge in the DOJ’s case. On the other aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers, we are appealing. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp’s meritless claims."

They also sent a blog post from August of 2023 that outlines how Google believes how Yelp wants Search to work would "harm consumers."

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After a couple months of backpedaling away form AI Overviews, Google just announced that the AI-powered Search feature is expanding. The feature is an AI summarization tool that provides compiled answers to queries put in Google Search that is presented over traditional search results.

Despite a horrendous launch of the search product in May, Google has been quietly tinkering away at the feature. 

In a blog post, Google announced a number of updates to the AI Search feature. 

Fact checking and relevance

In their posts, Google claims that "people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions."

They go on to say that the people visiting website via AI Overviews are spending more time on sites they visit, presumably in comparison to traditional search results. 

To improve relevant website information, the company is adding a new link display on the right side of the AI Overview on desktop, with a "site icons" button on mobile.

Apparently, some users might see the addition of links to relevant web sites in the text of the AI summaries (in addition to the links that already exist). Again, Google claims that this experiment has shown higher traffic results. 

There is a worry that AI Overviews could harm websites by keeping people from actually going to them for information. If you take Google at their word, the new linking systems are allegedly improving site traffic. 

The blog does say the feature is rolling out, but we have not received it yet on our accounts. As of this writing, we weren't able to see it in action yet.

It definitely seems like an attempt to show where information is coming from in a more user-friendly manner. 

We do wonder if these changes are a response to Microsoft Bing's version of AI Overview which actually offers much better citations and is far more informative than the current Google tool.

Search Labs

Google's beta version of Search called "Search Labs" offers curious guinea pigs a way to test out potential new features that might come to Google Search.

A couple that Google announced in this blog include the ability to "save" an AI Overview for reference as well as the ability to "simplify" the language of an AI-generated answer.

It feels like the dumbing down of something that is already meant to summarize complex information. 

You do need to sign up for Search Labs to test these beta features out and it appears to only be available to US-based searchers.

Global expansion

AI Overviews is being rolled out Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and the United Kingdom with this update. 

How Google will prevent another eat rocks situation in those countries is unclear. Though the company has reduced the prevalence of answers from untrustworthy sources like Reddit and Quora.

The company also lessened the types of inquiries that might trigger an AI overview to appear in search results.

Whether or not AI Overviews will become a viable worthwhile search tool remains to be seen.

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The fallout of Google's antitrust lawsuit continues to produce dramatic-sounding potential consequences for the company, with new reporting suggesting Google may have to give up or share large parts of its business portfolio.

Sources speaking to Bloomberg claim the U.S. Department of Justice is looking at possible remedies after a District court found Google to be monopolizing the search engine market. Some of those remedies could involve Google giving up Android, Chrome or Google AdWords (its advertising business), something that previous analyses have suggested.

Supposedly the most likely solution to be chosen would involve banning Google from making search exclusivity deals with other companies, such as the one it had with Apple to be the iPhone's default search provider. But other ideas include allowing rival search engines access to AdWords or Google's data, letting rival AI services to use Google training data, or preventing Google from forcing websites to allow training data scraping in order to list them.

Google is intending to appeal, but if the outcome stands, then the company could be fundamentally changed, even if most of the suggested remedies aren't carried out, and even if it takes a long time for the results of the remedies to appear.

Not even Google Search has the answers to what comes next

Android and Chrome are heavily tied to Google, and not just because it's the company that makes them. Using both to their full extent requires logging in with a Google account, and Google requires Android phone makers to agree to a set of terms to use the operating system, including installing default Google apps and making them hard or impossible to remove.

The Department of Justice has ordered many company break-ups in the past, but it didn't succeed in breaking up Microsoft in the 1990s, the closest comparable case. All bets are off when it comes to the outcome of this case, so all we can do is wait for the DoJ to make its proposal to Judge Amit Mehta, the judge who ruled on the Google antitrust case, and then see how he and Google respond.

In other Google news, the company held a Made by Google event yesterday where it showed off new Pixel devices and updates to its Gemini AI - two parts of the company that seem to be safe from getting broken off. If you're interested in learning more, we have guides to the Google Pixel 9, Google Pixel 9 Pro and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold phones, the Pixel Buds Pro 2 earbuds and the Pixel Watch 3 smartwatch, plus a guide to what's new with Gemini.

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Google has been dealt a serious blow in its ongoing antitrust lawsuit, originally filed by the U.S. federal government in 2020. Federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, concluding that Google is a monopolist that has spent billions of dollars trying to maintain that monopoly.

Not only is it extremely rare for a major corporation to be formally ruled to be illegally operating a monopoly, but it’s been hinted by antitrust officials that a possible Google breakup could be on the cards. It all depends on the outcome of the remedy phase, which will see Google appeal the ruling and a trial to determine how the search giant should be punished.

So what happens next?

What laws did Google break?

The ruling is that Google has violated section 2 of the Sherman Act, an antitrust law that’s been on the books since 1890 — specifically designed to outlaw monopolistic practices and encourage competition. The specific charges were that Google had violated two key areas of the Act: general search services and general text advertising via exclusive distribution agreements.

Part of the latter involves exclusive contracts Google has with Apple, which received billions of dollars in exchange for Google being the default search engine on Apple phones and browsers — a deal that reportedly cost Google $26.3 billion in 2021.

Microsoft was previously charged with violating similar laws in the late ‘90s, having been accused of monopolizing the web browser market in Windows. It was originally ruled that Microsoft had operated an illegal monopoly, though this decision was overturned in appeals with Microsoft and settling the case out of court.

Judge Mehta’s ruling praised Google for its engineering skill and the investment it made in search. However, he noted that the company’s exclusive deals gave it an unseen advantage that other search engines didn’t have — default distribution. 

While the Microsoft ruling was a case of illegally excluding rival browsers and platforms, Google was offering generous payments to maintain its dominance. This is where the problems arose, and the antitrust prosecutors claimed that people rarely change the default settings. Expert witness Antonio Rangel, the professor of neuroscience, behavioral psychology and economics at CalTech, testified that “the vast majority” of searches are done out of habit.

The case also revealed that Google controlled around 90% of the online search market, which rises to 95% when you focus on smartphones. 

Google maintained that it offered a superior product, hence the dominance, but Judge Mehta pointed to the “power of defaults” as helping maintain Google’s dominance in the field. On top of that, the more users that use Google, the more data it can collect, which in turn can be used to improve the quality of search results. That's a vicious cycle that would leave other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo at a disadvantage.

So what happens next?

The crucial thing here is that the case isn’t over yet. We’re now entering what’s known as the “remedy” phase, and Reuters points out that this is likely to be a lengthy process — possibly stretching until 2025 or 2026. This will involve Google appealing the ruling with the U.S. Court of Appeals, the District of Columbia Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. And Google has confirmed that the fight isn’t over yet.

Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google, said, “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.” Walker also notes that Google appreciates how the courts stated, on record, that Google is “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.” He said Google “has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,” “has continued to innovate in search,” and that “Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.”  

“Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal. As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

The specifics of that appeal aren’t clear right now, but it’s obvious Google won’t be going down without a fight. Presumably, though, business will continue as usual until the case has run its course. At that point, we’ll find out how the ruling will affect Google and its current corporate structure.

Avi Greengart from analyst firm Techsponential told Tom’s Guide, "As always with government intervention in tech, by the time this case finishes all the appeals and remedies processes, we may all be using genAI search from a different company anyway." In other words, it’ll be some time before any repercussions actually affect consumers — assuming they ever do.

However, the impact on consumers is not comparable to how the ruling may affect other antitrust cases against large tech companies in the future. 

Luther Lowe, the head of public policy for venture capital startup backer Y Combinator, commented on X, "Remember: US v Google case is broken into two parts. We now enter the remedy phase. This ruling could significantly reshape the competitive landscape to benefit "little tech" by reducing Google's gatekeeping power & creating more open competition in search & digital advertising." 

Adam Epstein, co-CEO and president of adMarketplace, also praised Judge Mehta for how thorough he was in "understanding the complexities of the search results and ads markets to reach the right decision." He added that "This is a massive win for the Government. And for the first time in decades, it shows that antitrust law can help define the boundaries between democracy and capitalism when it comes to Big Tech."

Google is far from the only tech company accused of violating antitrust laws in recent years, and regulators have leveled accusations against Apple, Amazon and Meta for ensuring their platforms give their own products an advantage — while smaller rivals are acquired before they can pose too much of a threat. Google itself is also subject to a second antitrust lawsuit, focussing on ad technology, which is expected to go to trial next month.

How will the Google decision affect you?

The wheels of the legal system take a long time to move, and the fact this case has been ongoing since 2020 is a clear indicator of that in action. So, it could be at leat a couple of years before the Remedy and appeals phases actually run their course. It’ll be a while before everyday consumers feel the effects of this ruling.

Without knowing what consequences Google will face for breaking antitrust laws, it’s difficult to say just how much this might impact users. Prosecutors have hinted that they may want to break up Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which could see various parts of the business spun off into their own solo companies. 

And while bad news for Alphabet and Google, ordinary consumers may not notice any change — so long as the spun-off services continue to operate and stay online. For most people, it doesn’t make the slightest difference that the search engine you use to find chili recipes comes from the same company that dabbles in smartphone software and self-driving cars.

The biggest change may be that Google ceases to be the default search engine on various devices and platforms. So, if you set up an iPhone 18 in late 2026, you may find that your smartphone is asking you to choose your own default search engine rather than automatically pushing you onto Google. It's similar to how Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge asked you if you wanted to install a new internet browser when you load up a PC for the first time.

Most people will probably pick Google anyway because that’s what they’re used to. This means that Google may still retain its dominant position as a leader in the search market. As Damien Rollins, COO director of market insights, SoCi marketing shared, few consumers are likely to care about Google's dominant position in the search market. But that dominance is under threat now thanks to a rise in AI-powered alternatives and "increasing complaints about Google's declining search quality."

In that kind of scenario, it would mean Google has to push to make sure its product is best without relying on the fact that most people will just use whatever they’re told to use. Some people might choose to use something else if given the chance.

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Google has been hit with a major legal blow in an antitrust lawsuit, with a federal judge ruling that the search giant violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The ruling could potentially change how Google Search operates, depending on what penalties Google is assessed.

"After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act," federal judge Amit Mehta wrote in the 277-page opinion.

The Sherman Act is an antitrust law that's been on the books since 1890, outlawing monopolistic business practices. The National archives describe the Act thusly, "The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly."

Specifically, Google has been charged with violating the Sherman Act in two areas: general search services and general text advertising via exclusive distribution agreements. The company has spent billions of dollars on exclusive contracts, including competitors like Apple, to become the dominant search browser on phones and browsers. 

Such contracts helped give Google global scale and most likely helped block other search engines like Microsoft's Bing or the privacy engine DuckDuckGo from gaining better standing.

This trial has been working through the system since 2020 when the Justice Department and several states sued Google over the company's dominance in search. At the time, the DOJ claimed that Google had over 90% of search traffic. Sites like Similarweb confirm that number showing that competitors like Bing and Yahoo barely have 6% in comparison.

The actual trial lasted 10 weeks in the fall of 2023, though closing remarks did not come until May of this year, during which Judge Mehta grilled Google lawyers. Google's central argument was that it isn't a monopoly because people use other companies like Amazon to search for products or social media to find music.

"Certainly I don’t think the average person would say, ‘Google and Amazon are the same thing," Mehta said.

Google's antitrust lawsuit draws comparisons to the turn of the millenium case that was brought against Microsoft for its own anticompetitive practices in forcing Internet Explorer to be on every device.

"Still, the court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants," Mehta wrote in the ruling. "It is no wonder then that this case has lacked the kind of nakedly anticompetitive communications seen in Microsoft and other Section 2 cases."

Google has already stated that the company plans on appealing Mehta's ruling. 

The fallout of this ruling will take some time to make its way to consumers, but it could drastically alter how Google makes its search engine available to consumers and may change how other companies interact with Google and whether or not Google is the default by impacting how Google deals with them.

Avi Greengart from analyst firm Techsponential thinks it'll take a while before we see the repercussions — if we ever do. In a statement to Tom's Guide, he said, "As always with government intervention in tech, by the time this case finishes all the appeals and remedies processes, we may all be using genAI search from a different company anyway."

It was likely never going to be the case, but US antitrust officials hinted that a possible Google breakup was in the cards at the beginning of the case, claiming that the tech giant's behavior could stifle innovation or the rise of a successor.

Luther Lowe, the head of public policy for Y Combinator (a venture capital startup backer), commented on X, "Remember: US v Google case is broken into two parts. We now enter the remedy phase. This ruling could significantly reshape the competitive landscape to benefit "little tech" by reducing Google's gatekeeping power & creating more open competition in search & digital advertising." 

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Google responds

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available. We appreciate the Court’s finding that Google is “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users”, that Google “has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices”, “has continued to innovate in search” and that “Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.”  Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal.  As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.” – Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs

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Thanks to a new AI deal, Google is now the only search engine that can scrape Reddit to show new posts in its search results. If competitors like Bing or DuckDuckGo want their users to see the same, they'll have to pay up. 

That's according to a new report from 404 Media, which first spotted that search engines other than Google aren't showing any Reddit results from the last week in their search results. If, like me, you frequently tag on "Reddit" or "site:reddit.com" to your search queries, you'll find the results are rather disappointing on Bing or DuckDuckGo right now. You'll either see outdated Reddit posts or a link that reads “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.”

Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told the Verge this development was "not at all related to our recent partnership with Google," referring to a $60 million deal struck in February to let the company train its AI models on Reddit's content. 

“We have been in discussions with multiple search engines," Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told the Verge. "We have been unable to reach agreements with all of them, since some are unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises regarding their use of Reddit content, including their use for AI.”

So rather than any kind of exclusivity agreement, it seems tied to Reddit's recent crackdown on web crawlers. Earlier this month, to enforce its policy against scraping, Reddit tweaked the site’s robots.txt file, which directs AI crawlers to which pages they can or can't glean information from. By preventing certain search engines from scraping its pages with AI bots, Reddit is essentially walling off its content to keep it out of search results. In short, Reddit is taking its ball and going home. Unless you want to play by its rules, that is, which Google, understandably, seems keen to. 

Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston confirmed to the Verge that Bing stopped hoovering up content from Reddit after it updated its robots.txt file on July 1st. “Microsoft respects the robots.txt standard and we honor the directions provided by websites that do not want content on their pages to be used with our generative AI models,” she added. 

So for now, Google is the exclusive home to Reddit content in its search results. At least until Reddit strikes an agreement with its competitors.

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Microsoft and the Bing team have announced a new AI-powered search experience that is more or less their version of Google's controversial AI overviews.

A blog post highlighting the new tool breaks down how Bing's version will be different with seemingly more upfront information (h/t Digital Trends). 

Bing's generative search is meant to create "a bespoke and dynamic response." These include links to sources and further reading.

The example provided in the blog is the query "What is spaghetti western?" The AI-generated results begin with an in large, bold font that reads: A subgenre of films produced by Italian filmmakers. 

Below this is an AI-summary highlighting different topics and including citations on where the information came from.

A source link is provided next to it, along with a number of summarized bites of information. On the left side of the screen there is an index for the different topics that the search produced. On the right are more traditional search results with links.

Microsoft claims that "early data indicates that this experience maintains the number of clicks to websites and supports a healthy web ecosystem."

The post also says that the Bing AI "understands the search query", meaning that conversational language or even non-specific queries are supposedly more likely to produce a result. Which is something that most large language models are capable of already but not specifically in a search engine.

The Bing team do say that the new search tool is being slowly rolled out. So, it's not clear who has access yet or when it will expand. They mentioned that they "will take our time, garner feedback, test and learn, and work to create a great experience before making this more broadly available."

Compared to Google's AI Overview, it isn't as minimalist and clean, but I think it looks and feels more informative with more actual options and links to information than the simple paragraph summary and a couple of links that Google is currently providing.

Between this and OpenAI's announcement of SearchGPT this week, Google is seeing some serious competition in the Search realm, especially when it comes to AI integration.

Google's AI overviews have been a disaster with a rushed implementation that has already been severely walked back.

Still, they are and remain the big dog the block with one study by HawkSEM claiming that Google had 1 billion daily active users in 2023 while Bing lagged far behind at 100 million daily users.

If other companies can start chipping away at Google with better search results perhaps it will make the giant take notice and actually improve its own search engine, which according to Ed Zitron is not doing well.

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When Google rolled out AI Overviews in search results back in May, the company was hit with an immediate backlash; mostly due to some of the absurd results that the AI summaries were providing. These included telling people to add glue to pizza or claiming that adding more cooking oil to an oil fire would help put it out.

A week after its introduction, Google had already reduced the prevalence of AI Overviews from 27% of search results all the way down to 11%. 

A new report from Search Engine Land using data from the SEO firm BrightEdge (via Android Police), says that number has gotten even lower and Google has nearly eliminated contributions from sources like Reddit and Quora.

The feature was designed to utilize AI tools to provide summaries of information and help users find relevant information faster. 

According to the BrightEdge data, certain categories of queries like education, entertainment and e-commerce showed the biggest drop. As an example, entertainment searches dropped from 14% to 0%, while education queries reduced from 26% to 13%. Meaning, that only 13% of education searches will feature an AI overview.

E-commerce searches also saw a drop from 26% to 9% as well. That may partly be attributed to Google removing product viewers and carousels from AI Overviews as well as product comparison tables. 

The more relevant information for users is what triggers AI Overviews. Using phrases that start with "Best", "What is", "How to" and "Symptoms of" are more likely to trigger an overview. However, it appears searches that include a brand name, a general product or that relate to lifestyle content either don't seem to get AI Overviews or receive them less often.

It's unclear how much of the internet AI Overviews was scraping when Google launched the service, but it was clear  that it should never have been pulling from sources like Reddit or Quora, sites notoriously filled with troll-level answers to even the most earnest questions.

This means that fewer user-generated suggestions will appear; roughly 85.71% and 99.69% less for information from Reddit and Quora, respectively.

Additionally, the AI Overviews appear to be taking up 13% less real estate on search pages, BrightEdge's data claims. Google is also trying to prevent duplication of data by not citing the same sources in the AI Overviews as in the search results below it.

Google hasn't quite given up on AI Overviews, as the tool still exists and is active. It remains to be seen if it joins other actually useful programs in Google's product graveyard (RIP Podcasts app).

As reminder, you can try block of sorts on AI Overviews by changing settings in Google to give you a back-to-the-basics Search that gets rid of the frills of AI Overviews and some other Google-induced headaches.

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Let us return to the halcyon days of 2022 when Google last offered paginated results in its search results. At the end of that year, the tech giant replaced pages with an endless scrolling method reminiscent of social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. 

Reports of Google dumping continuous scroll in search results started spreading this week after a report dropped on Search Engine Land.

The initial report said that the return of pagination would start on June 25, but we could not produce search results with pagination across a few different desktop browsers. 

We contacted Google, and the company confirmed that as of June 25, the ability to scroll through desktop search results continuously is gone. Infinite scrolling on mobile will follow in the coming months. However, Google did say that not all users would see the change immediately. It's a gradual rollout that started on June 25. 

In a statement to Tom's Guide, a Google spokesperson said, "We are constantly improving the Search experience. Through testing, we found that loading more results automatically didn’t lead to significantly higher satisfaction with Search."

According to Google, the return to pages will be similar to how you remember it from the 2022 days. When you reach the bottom of a page of results, "the next page of Search results will now only load when you click 'Next' at the bottom." Mobile users will see a different "More results" button. 

Page numbers also return with this change, which is attractive for SEO folks who pride themselves on getting to the first page. Before the last year and a half, there was a constant battle among SEO experts and websites to ensure their URLs ended on page one of a Google search. It did create a mentality of page one or bust.

Continuous scrolling was meant to combat that, but it appears that many users did not like the feature. Now, the change serves results faster instead of automatically loading results that users had not requested. 

With all of the changes Search has seen in the last couple of years, including the addition and subsequent slight rollback of AI overviews to search results, seeing how the return of pagination affects websites in the future will be a sign of how users respond to Google's ongoing machinations.

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Google’s Search algorithms all but rule the internet. As the dominant search engine on the planet, Search rankings can make or break a website — which has everyone and their aunt battling to try and claim the top spots. Those algorithms are a closely guarded secret, but leaked documents claim to shed some light on how Google Search operates.

SparkToro claims to have accessed over 2,500 of API documentation it claims originates from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse”. And in those documents are what appear to be key details of Google’s Search algorithm. Android Authority notes that these documents don’t show the way Search ranks different websites or how they treat different site characteristics. But it does seem to show what Google actually collects in its bid to offer users the most useful Search results.

Interestingly, the site also claims these documents leaked to GitHub back in March, only to be removed. However for now SparkToro is working in collaboration with iPullRank to try and figure out what all these alleged APIs are meant to do.

It’s a very big deal to get a glimpse into how Search does its thing. Google hasn't explicitly acknowledged the leak, but it's all-but-confirmed the documents are legitimate. The company has pointed out in a statement to The Verge that people shouldn’t make “inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information”. Meaning that even though the documents are legit, they’re no longer relevant. At least. according to Google.

Google regularly offers tips and best practices for websites, in order to help them improve and better optimize their content for Search. However it has never come out and told people what they should be doing, likely to avoid people trying to game the system. That does happen, and Google’s continual updates to the algorithm seem, in part, to try and combat this kind of activity.

Google Search and how the algorithm works

Google has always said that it advises “people-first content” focusing on readers and users rather than search engines. The general philosophy there is “EEAT” — or expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Which is all pretty self-explanatory. However the leaked documents suggest Google actually takes a different approach. 

Analysis by SparkToro and iPullRank of these documents suggest that different factors may be involved. These include domain authority, chrome data, clicks as a measure of success, the author in the byline, as well as seemingly using a sandbox to segregate new sites that haven’t developed the search engine’s trust yet.

These are all factors Google has denied using in the past. While it makes sense Google wants to keep the secrets of its flagship product, well, a secret these documents do suggest it’s been deliberately misleading.

Other factors noted in the documents are things we have known about in the past. Like the fact freshness of content matters, as does linking in and out to other relevant content. Branding and changing history also play a part, while demotion can occur for things like links not matching their target and presence or pornography — among other things. So the more things you have that Google likes, the more visible your content is likely to be.

Still, Google is sticking to its guns and is adamant that these documents are either out of date, inaccurate or not the full picture of how Google Search works. So we'll just have to see how this story develops over the coming weeks.

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Do you miss the simplicity of early 2000's Google, when it was free from clutter and metadata overload?

Well, the search giant has quietly introduced a new web filter that brings the nostalgic feel of its early search engine days to life.

This news seems to have slipped under the radar, after the barrage of announcements related to Google’s AI search engine at I/O earlier this month. 

The news of the filter was casually dropped on X by Google's @searchliaison account who stated it's for those who "prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results".

By using this web filter, you can bypass the overwhelming metadata such as address or link information, and enjoy a cleaner, more focused search experience. Let’s get back to basics.

Here's what you'll need...

• The essential URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
• The '%s' represents your search query
• The 'udm=14' tag restricts the results to the new web filter

How to make this the default

To make this your default search engine, Click the three–dot menu next to your new site search and choose ‘Make default.’ After setting it as the default, every search from the address bar will automatically use the web filter.

Since AI is the focus right now, it's not surprising that Google's new web filter may have been overlooked. If AI-powered searches interest you, 6 massive Gemini AI upgrades are incoming.

There are plenty of other hidden chrome tips that will make your browsing experience better, such as blocking third-party cookies and adding accessibility features like text-to-speech. 

Planning to get away this summer? Google is launching a few new features in Google Maps that aim to both help plan your trip and figure out what to do once you get there. 

These features draw on both the collective experiences of Google Maps users, as well as curated lists from reputable sites, to give you suggestions of must-see places to visit, as well as hidden gems

In addition, Circle to Search is also gaining a new ability, and rolling out to new devices. Here's what's coming to Google Maps on your phone. 

Recommendation lists

Rolling out to Google Maps are three new recommendation lists, which will appear when you launch the app and select a certain city. A Trending List will display spots that have shown a recent jump in popularity, updated weekly; the Top list shows places that are consistently ranked highly by Google Maps users, and a Gems list will show on-the-rise places that haven't been blown up yet by people finding them on lists of popular places to go.

In addition to using data from Google Maps users, these lists will also use information from expert sites, such as the New York Times' 36 Hours, Lonely Planet, and The Infatuation. If you find a list you like, you can save it and share it with friends.

These lists will be available initially for 40 cities in the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, and San Francisco.

Create your own lists

While Google Maps already lets you create lists of saved locations, a few new tools are being added so that you can better organize them. An update rolling out globally this month to both Android and iOS devices will let you change the order with which these locations appear on the list, so you can rank them they way they most make sense to you. 

Additionally, you'll be able to add links from your social media accounts, so if you ate a particularly great meal at a restaurant, you can add that to remind you why it's on your list in the first place. 

Circle to Search translation

Introduced in January, Circle to Search lets Google Pixel 7, Google Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24 users draw a circle around an item in a photo, and Google's AI will identify the object and perform a search, so you can find out what it is. 

In the next few weeks, Circle to Search is gaining a new feature, which will allow you to translate text, too, be it a menu, sign, or anything else that's in a language you don't understand. 

Circle to Search is also rolling out to more Android devices this week, including the Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7a and Samsung Galaxy S23 series, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, and Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 series; and coming soon to Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet.

AI insights and planning tools

Google is incorporating more of its AI into Maps to help provide a concise summary of a particular place. Drawing from what the Google Maps community has said, you'll  be shown some key attractions in an area, what people like about it, top places to eat, and photos that show identifying landmarks. If you're looking at a restaurant, the AI will identify Maps' users food photos, so you'll know what the dish is called, and if it piques your palate. 

Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) is also gaining a feature where it will help you plan an itinerary, such as "plan a 5-day trip to San Francisco that's all about wine." We go more in-depth here: Google's latest AI tool will help you plan your next vacation — here's how it works.

More from Tom's Guide

• 9 hidden Google Maps features everyone should know
• I used Google Bard to plan the perfect vacation, including flights and hotels — here’s what happened
• I asked Bing with ChatGPT to plan a trip to Amsterdam, and it didn't go as planned

Trying to scrub your personal information from search engines can feel like a losing battle, but Google's rolling out more tools to help empower users. The company announced a suite of upgraded and simplified privacy tools that make it easier than ever to find and remove your contact information from its search results.

Users will have the option to receive notifications from Google when their address, phone number or email address pops up in search results, allowing them to review and request that information be removed. 

This new tool builds on Google's Results About You dashboard, which it launched in September. Google plans to roll out the upgraded dashboard "in the coming days," according to a blog post on Thursday. 

The biggest difference with the update is that now you'll be able to find your information on Google without having to conduct a search for it yourself. Just enter your personal information, and the dashboard will automatically comb through the web and flag websites that contain any matches, which you can then review and submit a request to remove that information if need be. Additionally, you can opt to be alerted when your personal data's shared online moving forward. 

"We’ll also notify you when new results from the web containing your contact info pop up in Search, to give you added peace of mind," Google said. 

Previously, you'd have to enter your personal information into Search to find instances of it being shared online, and then manually request its removal. Now Google's simplified the process significantly, putting everything from requesting removals to identifying search results within the Results About Your dashboard. 

To access the dashboard, click on your Google account photo and select "Results about You." Or you can head there directly by visiting goo.gle/resultsaboutyou. At the moment, the upgraded tool is only available in the U.S. in English, though Google says it's "working to bring it to new languages and locations soon."

In that same blog post, Google also announced it's simplifying the process for requesting explicit imagery be removed from search results. In the past, Google's policy only allowed users to request nonconsensual explicit imagery be removed. Now, users can request the removal of any personal explicit images they'd prefer not to appear in search results. An important caveat to that is the policy does not apply to "content you are currently commercializing," meaning content creators will still need to rely on DMCA takedown requests if their content is being shared or reposted without their permission.

It's just one of a host of new tools and upgrades Google's adding to Search to make it more useful than ever. The company introduced its new Search Generative Experience (SGE) earlier this year, which uses artificial intelligence to summarize the web pages that appear in search query results. This week, users noticed references appearing alongside SGE page results, hinting that Google may be working on getting its AI-powered search engines to cite its sources as well.

More from Tom's Guide

• Google Maps new upgrade is a massive time-saver
• One of the best Google Pixel features could be coming to all Android phones
• Big Google Chrome changes are coming to your browser

Google Search is the most popular search engine on the planet, no matter what Bing says. It is the default search engine for Android phones and Chromebooks, as well as the popular Chrome browser. And when it can provide you with everything from movies to watch to how to transfer data from iPhone to iPhone, it's easy to see why people love it.

But Google Search is also loaded with all sorts of random features that are really hidden gems once you know about them. Setting a timer, translating foreign languages, conversions between different standards of measurements and currencies; the list of the things Google Search allows you to do is pretty long. You can even use it to tune a guitar.

So we put Google Search to the test to see what hidden features will turn you from a standard Google user into a power user and put together a list of 13 great ones that will change how you use the search engine. Oh, and make sure you get to the end. We saved our best hidden feature for last and you won't want to miss it.

Stopwatch and Timer 

Honestly, I had no idea this feature existed. But, apparently, you can just type “timer” into your Google Search and you'll see a timer ready to be used. There is also a stopwatch tab in case you need to count up instead of down. How cool is that? 

Shipment tracking 

Google Search's shipment tracking feature is really cool, and there are a couple of different ways to trigger it. One way to bring up the shipment tracking tool is to type "FedEx tracking" in Google Search. If you do, then the above appears asking you for your tracking number. This also works for UPS, DHL and USPS.

The other way to get tracking data though is to just enter your tracking number into Google Search directly. If it is with a major logistics company, Google will automatically pull up the tracking data from the company's site.

Conversions

Google Search will allow you to do a wide range of unit conversions. Need to know how many kilometers your five-mile-long journey will take? Google Search has it covered. It is also great in the kitchen for when you need to convert grams to ounces or cups to liters.

Translation

Google touts its translation features as a major selling point, but you don't need to go to Google Translate or pull up the Google Translate app on your phone to get Google to translate for you. Just type in the foreign word or phrase into Google Search and Google will automatically translate it for you through Google Translate.

Searching with Google Lens

Google Lens is an AI-powered tool from Google that uses your camera to provide contextual information based on what it can see. While it is its own tool separate from search, it does have a few handy integrations with Google Chrome that allow you to search using Google Lens.

First, if you have the stable build of Google Chrome (this is most people), you can search an image with Google Lens just by right-clicking on the image. It is super simple, and an easy way to get more information about a particular image. This ranges from related articles, videos, etc.

However, if you have Google Canary, you can search an entire page using Lens Region Search. It provides similar results but does not require you to click on a specific image. Just right-click on the page, click "Search page with Google Lens," and Lens does the rest. 

Google Canary is the more temperamental build of Chrome that allows Google to test new features, so only use it if you are comfortable with things potentially going wrong. It installs as a separate browser app from Google Chrome though, so you can still go back to the stable build if you want.

Smartphone only: Delete the last 15 minutes of search history 

This feature is part of Google Search's smartphone app, but it is very useful. If you go into the app and tap your profile picture, you can delete the last 15 minutes of your search history. Deleting your search history is not as easy as deleting your browser history, but this feature makes it much easier.

Instant search bar shortcut

Okay, this killer shortcut for Google Search is maybe more nifty than useful, but it will save you a couple of seconds. Whenever you are on a Google Search page and you want to bring the search bar back up, all you have to do is hit "/". Do that and you can start typing away for whatever you want to search for next.

Smartphone Only: Multisearch 

Google's iOS and Android apps got a new feature this year called multisearch. This feature combines image and text-based searching to find specific results. 

In the example above, the multisearch feature takes a photo of a yellow pair of heels, ands the text "flats" and produces a list of Google Shopping results for yellow flats in a similar style to the heels from the original image. Very useful for those looking to add something different to their wardrobe if nothing else.

Site search 

This is a Google Search feature that I never knew existed and now I use it all the time. If you type in "site:" and then add a website URL — like tomsguide.com — you then can get results specific to a particular site.

As you can see above, if you type "site:tomsguide.com iOS 16" Google Search will provide you with all our amazing iOS 16 coverage, and nothing from other sites. Very useful.

In-browser calculator 

Need a calculator? Google Search has you covered there. Just type in your math problem and Google not only provides an answer but a fully functioning in-browser calculator.

Tip Calculator 

This may be the most useful calculator that Google Search offers. Just type in "tip calculator" and Google will tell you how much you need to tip on a bill. You can even divide the tip easily between the members of your party.

Metronome 

Google has a ton of in-browser tools you can access via Google Search, including a metronome. Metronome, tuner, meditate color picker, spinner, roll die and flip coin work all work in your browser. Plus, if you are using one of these tools, you can access the others instantly.

The one complicated tool is tuner. Tuner works in the browser and is accessible from the other tools, but you have to specifically search for "Google tuner." Just searching for "tuner" won't work.

There is also a bubble level that only works from your mobile phone's Google Search app. This is because it needs your phone's sensors to work properly.

Learn new trivia

If you type in "fun fact" Google will provide you with a totally random fun fact. Whether you're studying up for trivia night or just bored, this feature is surprisingly useful.

Bonus: Play Pac-Man in Google Search

I saved the best feature for last. If you just type in "Pac-Man" into Google Search, you can actually play Pac-Man. For free. So treat yourself and go eat some ghosts.

If you enjoyed learning about these hidden Google Search features, make sure to check out our guides to 7 hidden Google Maps features everyone should know and 15 hidden Android features you should be using, then follow it up with a deeper dive into how to use Google Maps and how to enable Secure Folder on Android. If you want to see the possible future of search, try how to use Google Bard.

Apple has fingers in many different pies, but one area it has virtually no foothold in is search. Yes, there’s internal search — Spotlight for Mac, the way you find tracks on Apple Music and Siri’s ability to look things up — but an actual Google rival is something that hasn’t been on the cards, as of yet.

Rumors still persist that Apple will one day create a Google search rival, though, and it’s not hard to see why. Not only are search engines potentially big money (without Google search, it’s hard to see Pixel, Chrome, Gmail or many other things existing), but Apple has the key advantage of having billions of Macs and iPhones out there that could all push users towards its own theoretical search engine.

But a new report from The Information suggests any possible moves are at least four years away, partly due to a trio of former Google search engineers abandoning Apple and returning to the world of dedicated search. As the report explains, it deals “a potential blow to the Apple team quietly developing search capabilities that might compete head-on with Google’s.”

Said engineers joined Apple in 2018, when the company acquired Laserlike — a machine learning startup that could search the web for news, sites and video catered to the user’s tastes. But according to The Information’s report, all three founders — Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker and Anand Shukla — have now returned to the Google fold. 

While it’s not stated whether Apple has a dedicated web search engine in its plans, The Information’s source believes it simply isn’t in a position to reveal one any time soon. It’s “at least four years away from launching a potential Google search replacement”, the report reads, citing a source who “has been involved with the team.” 

For now, Apple actually actively promotes Google search on its devices for an estimated $18 to $20 billion per year, which isn’t exactly chicken feed even for a company with Apple’s annual income. But there are questions over how long this can last, with the Department of Justice sniffing around this and similar arrangements on antitrust grounds. 

If the DoJ brings an end to the lucrative agreement, then Apple wouldn’t have a reason not to enter the search game as an actual Google competitor, but it has other options in the short term. The Information suggests that Apple could strike a similar arrangement with Microsoft to make Bing the default, as its relatively small market share shouldn’t trigger the same antitrust scrutiny.  

While the idea Apple promoting Microsoft software sounds a bit fanciful, making a dedicated search engine is also far from a risk-free option, even if it could be done quickly. The Information’s report notes that any move in that direction would require a “significant increase in the team’s budget”, and it’s safe to say that results aren’t a sure thing. 

Microsoft has huge cash reserves and similar advantages to Apple with billions of Windows PCs worldwide, yet Bing remains a small player in the world of search. Whether a theoretical Apple alternative would perform any better is far from guaranteed.

In addition to cyberattacks, phishing attacks and malicious apps, cybercriminals can also abuse Google Ads to trick users into falling for their schemes.

As reported by BleepingComputer, if you searched for ‘GIMP’ on Google last week you may have seen an ad for the official website of the popular Photoshop alternative. However, this was actually a fake ad used to infect visitors with the VIDAR info stealing trojan.

Besides earning a spot among the best photo editing software, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is also open source and can be downloaded for free. Its official website is ‘GIMP.org’ and despite being a malicious ad, the fake ad spotted by BleepingComputer showed the correct web address.

If a user clicked on the ad (which has since been removed), they were taken to a phishing page that closely resembled GIMP’s official site. While they thought they were downloading the actual program, the fake site instead delivered a malicious file called ‘Setup.exe’ that would infect their computer with malware once installed.

Abusing Google Ads

According to a support document about Google Ads, the service allows advertisers to use a display URL that is shown in the ad and a landing URL that visitors are taken to after they click on the ad. In this case, the display URL was ‘GIMP.org’ while the landing URL was the fake ‘gilimp.org’. Normally in Google Ads though, the display and landing URLs need to point to the same site.

In a Reddit post, a user pointed out that the hackers behind this campaign may have used an IDN homograph technique to make the Cyrllic spelling of Gimp’s website (xn–gmp-jhd.org) appear like the Latin ‘gimp.org’. However, this seems unlikely since ‘gilimp.org’ and another fake domain called ‘gimp.monster’ were used in the campaign. At the same time, a potential bug in Google Ad Manager could have been responsible, but that's still unknown at this time.

Regardless, hackers often buy ad space on legitimate platforms like Google Search and other search engines to launch malvertising campaigns. However, many of these malicious ads can actually launch attacks without being clicked on.

In an email to Tom's Guide, a Google spokesperson provided further insight on the fake GIMP ads that appeared in its search engine last week, saying: “We have strict policies designed to protect people from abuse and combat fraud across our platforms, which we enforce vigorously. The ads in question were flagged by our systems and removed for policy violations.”

Malvertising vs. adware

Even though they both involve advertising, malvertising and adware are actually quite different. 

Adware is a type of malware that can infect your computer and smartphone while malvertising or malicious advertising is a term used to describe bad ads that can lead you to phishing sites and other dangerous web pages according to a blog post from AVG. However, both hide in plain sight.

Once you install an adware app on one of your devices, you’ll start seeing ads that you normally wouldn’t encounter online. The creators of one of these apps may also hijack the ads you normally see to replace them with new ones that when clicked, earn them ad revenue.

What makes malvertising so dangerous is the fact that your device doesn’t need to be infected with malware first. This is because the malicious ads used in these campaigns are hosted on legitimate websites like Google in the example above.

Either way, malvertising and adware are both threats that you need to watch out for online as you could have your passwords and other sensitive data stolen if you happen to fall victim to either.

How to stay safe from malicious ads

The easiest way to stay safe from malicious ads is to avoid clicking on ads altogether. With these fake ads for GIMP, if users had just scrolled farther down the search results they would have seen a link to GIMP’s official website. Clicking on it would have allowed them to download the actual program instead of being taken to a phishing site distributing malware.

While the ads at the top of Google Search and other search engines may be convenient, there is a small chance that they could actually be fake. This is why it makes sense to avoid them and go directly to the official site of a product or service you’re interested in instead. Likewise, you can install one of the best ad blockers to limit the amount of ads you see online.

If you do click on an ad online, you should take a close look at the domain name of the site it takes you to ensure it’s legitimate. Does the URL have any misspelled words or does anything else look out of place? If so, it could be a phishing page and not a company’s official website.

Whether or not you choose to continue clicking on ads online is up to you. However, by installing one of the best antivirus software solutions on your devices, you can help protect yourself from malicious ads and fake sites that spread malware and other viruses.

At its recent Search On event, Google announced that it is taking steps to reinvent the wheel with its search engine. As the world moves to a more visual-first approach with apps like TikTok and Instagram, Google is finding new ways to integrate more visual ways for people to search and discover.

With Google Search we could already do a voice search or search using an image, but the tech giant will expand this further to include more content types and many more interactive features. One of the big changes the search engine will get is images and video content in the search results — that will not present themselves as separate boxouts anymore — but will merge into the results itself.

Google is looking at making its search engine more fluid and interactive. On the company blog, Cathy Edwards, who is the Vice President of Search, says, “we’re working to make it so you’ll be able to ask questions with fewer words — or even none at all — and we’ll still understand exactly what you mean”. 

For example, the Google app on iOS will now see shortcuts laid out under the search bar so users are not left wondering “how” to search for something. This will include options like “identify song by listening," “solve homework with camera," “shop for products using screenshots” and “translate text with camera."

Other handy search features will include a more developed autocomplete and there will be keyword or topic options that will also pop up to help specify finding things.

 ‘Stories’ in Google Search 

The big change is in the way Google will show up some of the results using different multimedia. So once you have found the right words for your search, Google will highlight  “the most relevant and helpful information, including content from creators on the open web”.

This means that if you search for a specific city, for example, you will see stories and short videos from content creators that highlight things like tips on how to explore the city or things to do.

Google says the information will come in from a variety of sources and won’t be classified separately as text, image or video. The reimagined search will be a lot more interactive and help users “discover” more information as well. The company says this feature will be available in the “coming months."

Google is using advanced machine learning for some of its new translation features as well. There is a new Lens translation update where you can point your camera at a poster in another language and it will translate the text and overlay it on the image itself.

 Easy search for specific food items

Google is also making it much easier to find specific food items near you. The new “Multi search near me” feature will let users take a picture of a dish or a screenshot and instantly find it nearby. 

Multi search was already a feature that was launched earlier this year — it allows people to search through a screenshot for a specific item using Lens. Now the tool has expanded and will save us some time browsing through menus looking for exactly what we want to eat.

Most of the new features will first make their way to US users on the iOS Google app in the coming months before a more widespread roll out.

Next: Google Search just got a handy upgrade for finding things fast — and you can try it now. Also check out 11 hidden Google Search features that will make your life easier.

It seems like privacy is pretty hard to come by in the internet age, especially when search engines are involved. But Google’s doing a little bit to help, with new tools that are designed to remove search results featuring personal identifiable information (PII) — which includes contact details.

Google announced this change at Google I/O back in May, and now the new tools have started rolling out. This means you can start filing requests to have your personal information removed from Google searches.

This isn’t the first time Google has given people the ability to remove personal details from search results. The best known example is the EU’s ‘Right to be Forgotten,' which came into force in 2014. Google also has policies in place for people to request removal of results featuring images of minors, sites with exploitative removal practices (sites that require people to pay money directly to them or to other agencies to get the content removed), alongside various kinds of pornography — specifically content posted without consent, faked content and so on. 

These new tools are designed to streamline the whole process and make it easier to ask Google to pull personally identifiable information. 

According to Google’s support page these requests allow the removal of confidential government IDs (including social security numbers), bank account numbers, credit card numbers, images of handwritten signatures, images of ID documents, official and restricted medical records (like medical records), confidential logins and personal contact information — specifically addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

Google also claims it will “consider” removing professional contact information when 'doxxing' is a concern.

How to remove your personal information from Google search results

To get the process started you need to head over to Google’s removal request form and start filling out information. 

Alternatively Android users can kick things off by opening the Google app, tapping their profile picture in the top right corner, and selecting the ‘Results About You’ option. While the web form seems to be available for everyone, the Google app forms are still rolling out.

The most important part of this whole process is that you tell Google what information is being removed, whose information it is alongside links to and screenshots of the offending webpages. It’s a very simple step-by-step process, and Google walks you through everything as you progress. 

It should only take you a few minutes to sort out, after which you’ll get an automated confirmation. Google will then review the request, ask for more information if needed, and inform you of whatever action has been taken, which includes an explanation if your request was rejected.

Users will also be able to skip a bunch of the bureaucracy if they find an offending web page while browsing. Simply tap the three-dot menu in the top right corner of the result, which opens the About This Result panel. This now has a “Remove Result” option, which then walks you through the removal request process. Again this is still rolling out to everyone, and may not appear on desktop or mobile for a little while.

It’s not clear how long these requests take to process, or how Google will decide if something isn’t eligible for removal. But streamlining the process is a good thing, especially when personal information is weaponized by bad actors online with increased regularity and effectiveness. The last thing you want is your information floating around for the whole world to find on Google.

It doesn’t stop websites from hosting that information or potentially refusing to take it down. But it does make it a lot harder for people to find it.

Google search is literally loaded with all sorts of random features. Setting a timer, translating foreign languages, conversions between different standards of measurements and currencies; the list of the things Google search allows you to do is pretty long.

The stopwatch and timer feature actually disappeared for a brief time. Search Engine Roundtable discovered that the nearly decade-old feature stopped working back in July 2022. Luckily, Google’s Public Search Liason Danny Sullivan says that the feature has finally been fixed and is now back.

In honor of the timer’s return, we searched (no pun intended) for 11 awesome Google search features (including the timer) that deserve your love and attention in case they ever go away.

Oh, and make sure you get to the end. We saved our best feature for last and you won't want to miss it.

Stopwatch and Timer 

Honestly, I had no idea this feature existed. But, apparently, you can just type “timer” into your Google search and you got a timer ready to be used. There is also a stopwatch tab in case you need to count up instead of down. How cool is that? 

Shipment tracking 

Google search's shipment tracking feature is really cool, and there are a couple of different ways to trigger it. One way to bring up the shipment tracking tool is to type "FedEx tracking" in Google search. If you do, then the above appears asking you for your tracking number. This also works for UPS, DHL and USPS.

The other way to get tracking data though is to just enter your tracking number into Google search directly. If it is with a major logistics company, Google will automatically pull up the tracking data from the company's site.

Conversions

Google search will allow you to do a wide range of unit conversions. Need to know how many kilometers you five-mile long journey will take? Google search has it covered. It is also great in the kitchen for when you need to convert grams to ounces or cups to liters.

Searching with Google Lens

Google Lens is an AI-powered tool from Google that uses your camera to provide contextual information based on what it can see. While it is its own tool separate from search, it does have a few handy integrations with Google Chrome that allow you to search using Google Lens.

First, if you have the stable build of Google Chrome (this is most people), you can search an image with Google Lens just by right-clicking on the image. It is super simple, and an easy way to get more information about a particular image. This ranges from related articles, videos, etc.

However, if you have Google Canary, you can search an entire page using Lens Region Search. It provides similar results but does not require you to click on a specific image. Just right-click on the page, click "Search page with Google Lens," and Lens does the rest. 

Google Canary is the more temperamental build of Chrome that allows Google to test new features, so only use it if you are comfortable with things potentially going wrong. It installs as a separate browser app from Google Chrome though, so you can still go back to the stable build if you want.

Smartphone only: Delete the last 15 minutes of search history 

This feature is part of Google search's smartphone app, but it is very useful. If you go into the app and tap your profile picture, you can delete the last 15 minutes of your search history. Deleting your search history is not as easy as deleting your browser history, but this feature makes it much easier.

Instant search bar shortcut

Okay, this killer shortcut for Google search is maybe more nifty than useful, but it will save you a couple of seconds. Whenever you are on a Google search page and you want to bring the search bar back up, all you have to do is hit "/". Do that and you can start typing away for whatever you want to search for next.

Smartphone Only: Multisearch 

Google's iOS and Android apps got a new feature this year called multisearch. This feature combines image and text-based searching to find specific results. 

In the example above, the multisearch feature takes a photo of a yellow pair of heels, ands the text "flats" and produces a list of Google Shopping results for yellow flats in a similar style to the heels from the original image. Very useful for those looking to add something different to their wardrobe if nothing else.

Site search 

This is a Google search feature that I never knew existed and now I use it all the time. If you type in "site:" and then add a website URL — like tomsguide.com — you then can get results specific to a particular site.

As you can see above, if you type "site:tomsguide.com iOS 16" Google search will provide you with all our amazing iOS 16 coverage, and nothing from other sites. Very useful.

In-browser calculator 

Need a calculator? Google search has you covered there. Just type in your math problem and Google not only provides an answer but a fully functioning in-browser calculator.

Tip Calculator 

This may be the most useful calculator that Google search offers. Just type in "tip calculator" and Google will tell you how much you need to tip on a bill. You can even divide the tip easily between the members of your party.

Metronome 

Google has a ton of in-browser tools you can access via Google search, including a metronome. Metronome, tuner, meditate color picker, spinner, roll die and flip coin work all work in your browser. Plus, if you are using one of these tools, you can access the others instantly.

The one complicated tool is tuner. Tuner works in the browser and is accessible from the other tools, but you have to specifically search for "Google tuner." Just searching for "tuner" won't work.

There is also a bubble level that only works from your mobile phone's Google search app. This is because it needs your phone's sensors to work properly.

Bonus: You can play Pac-Man in Google search

I saved the best feature for last. If you just type in "Pac-Man" into Google search, you can actually play Pac-Man. For free. So treat yourself and go eat some ghosts.

Next: Google is completely shaking up how we search and announced new updates at their recent Search On event.

Google has many tricks and shortcuts that help narrow down exactly what you are looking for — and it just rolled out a new search feature that should speed things up even more. When you use quotes in a search, that particular word or phrase will show up in a snippet in bold under the webpage — and not just that: Google will indicate where exactly that word/phrase will appear on the site.

The new update from Google should save you precious minutes that are spent in scrolling through websites, finding the exact term you are looking for. Google already had “search with quotes” in place, which brought up only those pages that contained those particular words. 

Now in a blog post, Google mentions that it is updating its search shortcut to help users find content much faster. Google “generally” makes the quoted words bold in the webpage snippets when searched for on a desktop, but not when accessed through a phone.

In Google’s example, the term “google search” is highlighted in bold below each webpage that it is found. The sentence that is under the webpage is a snippet that Google has created to help users find the term, rather than a description or context of the webpage.

I tried Google’s new search update with the search term “wireless phone chargers” and “green lawn” while doing some research and it worked exactly as described. I could find exactly what I needed in minutes, especially because these were phrases I was specifically looking for and not standalone words.

Google said that it didn’t do this earlier because it was not always easy to create a snippet around the words that were being searched for — especially if they were part of something like a menu item. But feedback from users prompted the company to make this change. It realized users don’t really want to see an overall description of the webpage but where the quoted material on that particular page appears. 

There are some caveats to the new search update. Google notes that some search text could be hidden in a meta description tag or alt text, preventing Google from throwing up a snippet in those cases. And you might not see all the mentions in a snippet if they're too far apart. 

Google acknowledges that using quote search is probably targeted at "power users" and says, “We generally recommend first doing any search in natural language without resorting to operators like quotation marks. Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary”.

The new update is a nice improvement to one of Google’s search hacks and we will have to see how much time we save and how it can really benefit us. 

Next: Google is completely shaking up how we search and announced new updates at their Search On event. Here's how to use Google Maps with all its tips and tricks and here are 11 hidden Google Search features that will make your life easier. 

Also, Google has made it easier to remove personally identifiable information from search — here's how.

Could Apple be set to challenge Google on its own turf? That’s a very real possibility, according to blogger Robert Scoble, who claims that Apple is preparing to launch its own search engine.

This was a final point in a long Twitter thread about things to expect from Apple at WWDC and beyond. Though this is very much in the ‘beyond’ section, so don’t expect an announcement imminently. 

Intriguingly, when quizzed by our sister site TechRadar, Scoble stated that this would be “the most expensive product launch of all time," so it would be a pretty serious undertaking considering the general expense of Apple launches. He told the site that this would likely emerge in January, and that his information was a mixture of conversations with sources and his own deduction.

Why search?

What isn’t entirely clear is what the scope of this project is. When we think of search engines, we instinctively think of Google, Bing and maybe DuckDuckGo, but search is built into macOS and iOS for finding files, and it’s also where Siri gets its information, so could this be something behind the scenes?

That question was put directly to Scoble on Twitter, and while he said he didn’t know for sure, he indicated that this would be a big thing for Siri in particular:

Elsewhere, he expanded on this. “Had dinner six years ago with head of Siri at Apple and he laid out why Siri would need to be rebuilt,” he replied to someone asking about sources. “We haven't seen that rebuild yet. It will come with the headset.”

But what if it’s something bigger than that, and a real alternative to Google? Well, the whole “most expensive product launch” quote certainly points to that, and the financial incentive is definitely there. 

While Google’s parent company Alphabet doesn’t directly split its search revenue in an easily digestible form, we know that ad revenue accounted for around $149 billion in 2021, and the lion’s share will be search related. 

With Macs, iPads and iPhones now ubiquitous, maybe Apple believes it can genuinely compete, making its own search engine the default in Safari, rather than standing aside for Google.

But doing so isn’t a risk-free endeavor. Google has been the dominant search engine for 22 years now, and alternatives barely have a foothold, even when built by companies not exactly short of R&D funds like Microsoft and Yahoo. 

While it doesn’t hurt for Apple to try in theory, the company reportedly takes in over $15 billion a year from Google just for making it the default search engine in Safari. It’s a lot of money to give up for something that could very easily fall flat on its face.

We shall have to see what — if anything — comes to pass in January.

About eight years ago, I reviewed the Amazon Fire Phone, a short-lived device that quickly disappeared thanks to a slow processor, low-resolution screen and short battery life. Perhaps the only interesting feature of the Fire Phone was something called Firefly, which could not only identify products, but could then also take you to Amazon so you could then purchase it. 

Google's new Scene Exploration feature seems to have taken this one idea and made it immensely more useful. Announced at Google I/O 2022, Scene Exploration will let you point your phone's camera at an object and then ask a question to help filter your results. And you can pan around while you do it to scan multiple objects in real time. 

For example, the presenter at Google I/O displayed a rack of candy bars, and then asked Scene Exploration to highlight ones that were highly rated, nut-free and made from dark chocolate. Scene Exploration then highlighted a few chocolate bars, along with ratings for each. And, of course, provided you a way to purchase them if you wanted.

Google said that the feature could also be used so that you could filter your selections by products from minority-owned businesses or other metrics. 

Scene Exploration looks similar to apps such as Vivino, which use machine learning to identify wine labels, and then provides ratings, tasting notes. Except with Google, it seems like you'll be able to search for anything. 

Scene Exploration is an outgrowth of Multisearch, which lets you combine both text and images when searching for something in Google. However, Scene Exploration looks like it will make it easier to find just what it is you're looking for. 

Google has not said when this feature will roll out, so look for it in the coming months.

Read next: Google has made it easier to remove personally identifiable information from search — here's how

If you're having to research how to remove contact details from Google Search, including email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers, there's a good chance you're not happy with your information being out there. That's more than understandable.

Personal contact information being available via Google Search obviously poses privacy concerns. More than that, though, it can also present actual danger to individuals, from the possibility of online harassment all the way up to physical and criminal abuse. And while it has been possible for some time to have personal information like baking details, credit card numbers and medical records removed from Search, the same has not applied to contact details.

That's all changed now that Google has made it possible to have personal contact details removed from Search. This is not the same as having that information removed from the internet completely, but will be some relief for anyone who has been doxxed or otherwise had their data leaked.

Read on to find out how to remove your personal contact information from Google Search.

The importance of internet safety is paramount, and ever increasing. If you'd like to find out more about looking after your virtual privacy and staying safe online, make sure you read our picks of the best identity theft protection services, best password managers and best parental control apps.

How to remove contact details from Google Search

1. Visit support.google.com/websearch/ and in the search bar start typing "remove select personally identifiable info." Once you start typing, the relevant help page will drop down. Select the option.  

2. Once the page opens, scroll down until you see the Start removal request button. Click on the button to start your request.

3. On the next page, you’ll see a table with several gray rows, two of which have pencils next to them. Click the top pencil icon and the row titled “What do you want to do?” will expand. 

4. This guide covers removing personal contact information, so next you will want to select Remove information you see in Google Search. Now Click on the lower pencil icon and the next row will expand. 

5. Under “The information I want removed is:”, select In Google’s search results and on a website. Note, even though this is selected, Google will not be able to remove information from websites, only from appearing in its search results.

Alternatively, you can select Only in Google’s Search results. When selected, you will simply have to input the URLs you wish to no longer appear in search results. Once you have submitted the URLs, you can check on the progress of your application using the link at the bottom of the form.

6. If you've selected In Google’s search results and on a website, you will now need to enter whether or not you have requested the website remove the content. Select either Yes or No, I prefer not to in order to continue with the request. More rows will now drop down.

7. Under "I want to remove", tick Personal info, like ID numbers and private documents, then Contact information, like addresses, phone number or email address. A form will now appear below.

8. Scroll down to the form and fill in the details requested in each of the boxes, including URLs for information and images. Upload screenshots as evidence. 

If you need help taking a screenshot, make sure you check out one of our guides: 

• How to screenshot on Windows 10
• How to screenshot on Mac
• How to screenshot on Chromebook
• How to take a screenshot with your iPhone
• How to take a screenshot on Android
• How to screenshot on iPad

9. Finally, fill out the search term which surfaces the content you'd like removed and add any additional comments. Tick the T&Cs box and then press Submit. Make sure you save or bookmark any links for checking the progress of your submission.

You'll now need to wait for confirmation from Google as to whether the personal information can be taken down. If you would also like to have the information removed from the website, you will need to contact the website owner also. 

You can also check out the 11 hidden Google Search features that will make your life easier.

If you'd like to know more ways to increase your online privacy and security, make sure you read our guides on how to disable location tracking on Android, how to disable location tracking on iPhone, how to stop spam texts on iPhone, how to avoid Amazon scams, how to fix your router's security and how to set up a credit fraud alert. To improve your local computing security, read our guides on how to password protect folders on Windows and how to password protect a folder on Mac.

Searching in the Google app is about to get a lot more specific. A new multisearch feature, now available for both Android and iOS users, lets you combine pictures with text for more refined searches.

Google sees its new multisearch capability as ideal for shopping queries, particularly if you're looking for something that fits in with a particular style or home decor. By taking a picture using the Google lens feature and then adding text to the search query, you can track down similar items in specific colors, designs or styles.

Among the examples Google gives for its new multsearch feature are taking a picture of an orange dress and using text search terms to find something similar in green. You can also take pictures of your dining set, Google says, and find a matching table by searching for the term "coffee table."

The feature is available now in beta form for English-language searches on either the Android of iOS version of the Google app, and it's pretty easy to use. For example, I was able to snap a photo of one of my favorite Hawaiian shirts to try and find that same style in green and gold.

While Google is touting this as an e-commerce tool at the moment, multisearch will truly be a great addition when its use cases can expand to other areas that would benefit from a combination of search terms using words and pictures. Cleaning tips, first-aid guidance and other how-to suggestions would seem like a natural fit for multisearch.

How to use Google multisearch

You don't have to wait to try the feature out. Here's how to get started with multisearch in the Google app.

1. From the Google app, tap the Google Lens button. From there you can either search for a screenshot on your camera roll or snap a photo.

2. The Google app will list search results. Swipe up and tap the "+ Add to your search button," typing in your search query.

You'll get a page of results based on your search term and photo.

Google says the new search capability is powered by advances in AI. It's looking to enhance the feature using its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to improve results down the road.

Read next: Google has made it easier to remove personally identifiable information from search — here's how

Android users are about to get a very useful tool for Google search, one that iOS users have been able to use since last summer. It's the ability to wipe the last 15 minutes of your search history with a single tap.

This new feature was first spotted by XDA editor-in-chief Mishaal Rahma, and confirmed by Google in a statement to The Verge. Apparently Google is rolling out the feature to Android users, and expects it to be available to everyone within the coming weeks. (But if you're using Chrome on a desktop, you'll want to keep it updated.)

Some members of the Tom’s Guide staff have access to the new feature, but others do not — myself included. However, it’s easy to check and see whether you’re one of the lucky ones that got the feature early.

Head into the Google app on Android, and tap your Profile Picture in the top right corner. You should then see an option to Delete last 15 minutes between “Search History” and “Recent." With that one tap Google will wipe any and all search history from your account from within that 15 minute timeframe.

There are several ways to delete your search history on Android. But until now the only options were to wipe it all, or the arduous process of manually deleting each term yourself. This update means you have another option.

This should make life easier if you’ve been hunting for a gift for your significant other, or you’ve been looking at stuff you don’t want visibly tied to your Google account for more than a few minutes. 

Google originally announced this feature would come to Android by the end of 2021, and it’s unclear why it missed that deadline. It’s also not clear whether it will be coming to desktop devices in the future. However, now that iOS and Android users are covered, desktop could be next. 

Next: Here are 11 hidden Google Search features that will make your life easier.

Update: Android users can now delete the last 15 minutes of their search history — here's how

If you've tried to use Google Search at night and been dissatisfied by how bright its dark mode was, you'll be glad to know that you'll be able to search for whatever you're curious about in an even darker dark mode either right now or soon.

The upgraded dark mode for google.com was announced last year and confirmed to be rolling out to devices earlier this month, but is now going live for many users. Previously, the dark mode offered only a gray background, but the new one is true, unadulterated #000000 black. However, it's only the colors of the background, Google logo and links that have changed, so there's no way to tell if you can use the updated dark mode until you check for it.

While you'll notice a difference on any desktop or mobile screen you use this with, the biggest benefit will be found on OLED devices like recent smartphones and some tablets and laptops. OLED screens are better at showing "true black" than LCD screens, plus it'll actually save you a bit of power too due to the way OLED panels' pixels can illuminate themselves individually.

I've been able to see the updated dark mode on my iPhone 13 Pro Max (both Safari and Chrome), on Chrome on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus and in Chrome on my Surface Laptop Go. I've included screenshots here if you can't embrace the darkness for yourself yet.

If you prefer the softer coloring of the old dark mode, there currently seems to be no way to bring it back. Unless Google changes its mind or ends up offering another setting to its Dark mode toggle, it seems like it's gone for good. 

If you want to try this update on your own devices, all you have to look for the dark mode toggle on the bottom of the main Google Search page. Simply clicking or tapping this will enable it.

Next: Check out how to enable dark mode on iPhone to avoid eye strain.

Update: Anyone can sign up for DuckDuckGo’s email privacy service — here’s how.

Yet another new search engine, You.com, has debuted on the internet promising to preserve user privacy better than big bad Google. But for a privacy-minded venture, it seems to be kind of intrusive.

"You.com is sparking a movement to take back the internet and give people control of the information they consume so they can live more thoughtful digital lives free from manipulation," said Richard Socher, You.com CEO and co-founder, in an announcement today about the availability of the public beta (Nov. 9). 

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"With you.com, we're fostering a much more open interface that people can contribute to — not just with likes, upvotes, and engagement — but with the co-creation of apps and content in an environment of trust, facts, and kindness."

Socher has a Stanford doctorate in computer science and until recently was working on artificial intelligence and natural-language processing for Salesforce, and Salesforce head honcho Marc Benioff is named as You.com's lead investor. (The company has raised $20 million so far.)

The company promises that it "never sells personal information, nor does it ever track users around the internet," and "has committed to never offering targeted privacy-invading ads."

Name, email address and browser extension

So we were a little taken aback when we tried to use You.com — and were promptly told that we had to install a Chrome extension first. 

Yikes! Knowing what we do about how badly Chrome extensions can be abused and how much data they can collect, we advise having as few extensions enabled as possible. 

OK, how about "search.you.com"? Nope, got a 404 there. The other privacy-minded search engine that debuted in the past couple of months, Brave Search, lets you use it with no strings attached at "search.brave.com." 

But it turns out you can add You.com as the default search engine on most browsers, which doesn't raise any privacy red flags. (Here's a page with instructions for most major browsers.)

Anyway, we took You.com for a spin. Searching for "fish," we got a nice-looking grid of results in rounded-square tiles, perfect for mobile screens. The page looks very different from the text-heavy list interface you get from most search engines. Instead, it looks like what we'd have seen if Apple had ever come up with its own search engine.

Dictionary definitions led the results, followed by web-search results that were nearly identical to Bing's results. News stories were next, followed by a Wikipedia link that got its own row. (Google, Brave Search and the truly privacy-minded DuckDuckGo all led with Wikipedia.) We didn't see any ads.

You.com says its results are partly based on user feedback, and that you can re-rank the results you get. We tried doing so and were taken immediately to a screen that asked us to create a You.com user account and provide our full name and email address. So much for total privacy.

How does You.com plan to make money?

In fact, people searching for things online may not be You.com's actual clients.

Speaking to VentureBeat, Socher said that "our new platform will enable companies to contribute their most useful actual content to that first page, and — if users like it — they can take an action right then and there." (Thanks to Gizmodo's Sam Rutherford for pointing us to that.) 

A TechCrunch piece said that You.com plans to "concentrate on complex consumer purchases," which implies that You.com may plan to make some money through affiliate links.

However, it's not totally clear what You.com's business model is yet, and Socher wouldn't tell VentureBeat or TechCrunch what it might be. (VentureBeat did glean that You.com has about 30 employees.) But Benioff and a few venture-capital firms are going to expect something back for their investment.

We've reached out to You.com with a few questions, and we will update this story when we receive a reply.

After months of buildup, the makers of the Brave browser have finally made the company's own privacy-focused search engine, appropriately named "Brave Search," the primary search engine on the Brave browser.

"Brave Search is built on top of an independent index and doesn't track users, their searches or their clicks," the company said in a press release yesterday (Oct. 19).

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Brave Search is now the default search engine on new installations of the desktop version of Brave, as well as the Brave Android and iOS apps, in Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Other countries will be switched over later. 

Existing Brave users are unaffected, but can always switch their browser's search engine to Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Google, Qwant or Startpage. Anyone can use Brave Search from any browser at https://search.brave.com/.

Brave is a Chromium-based browser that's been around for a couple of years. We use Brave a lot, as it's fast, strips out most ads and works just as well as Chrome does with Google's online services.

How to make Brave Search your default

To set Brave Search as your default search engine in the Brave Browser, tap the three vertical lines at the top right of the browser window and scroll down to and click Settings. 

On the resulting page, click "Search engine" in the left-hand navigation bar. A drop-down menu at the top of the page lets you choose your search engine. 

"As we know from experience in many browsers, the default setting is crucial for adoption," Brave CEO Brendan Eich said. "Brave Search has reached the quality and critical mass needed to become our default search option, and to offer our users a seamless privacy-by-default online experience."

Eich co-founded Mozilla and created JavaScript previously in his career, and was briefly CEO of Mozilla until it became known he'd contributed to a California political campaign opposing same-sex marriage.

Back in June 2021 when Brave Search entered public beta testing, Eich told Tom's Guide that the new search engine was designed to be "the first multi-platform, private, browser/search alternative to the Big Tech platforms."

In a statement of principles posted online in June, Brave promised that Brave Search would not track or profile users, would use its own search engine whenever possible (it reaches out to Bing and Google when it has to) and would be transparent about its search algorithms and ranking systems.

However, Brave Search reserves the right to show ads like Google does, although it isn't doing so yet. Users who want to avoid ads will have to pay an undisclosed amount.

How well does Brave Search work?

We took Brave Search out for a spin in June, and again today (Oct. 20). It's nearly the equal of Google and Bing for general queries such as "fish," displaying map results, related questions and videos as well as relevant web links, though it's not as good with images. 

For more specific results, Brave still does pretty well, though it's the area in which Google excels. 

A search for "Calliaqua," a town on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent, returned the Wikipedia page in the top position, but some of Brave's (and Bing's) other top results were for a luxury villa of the same name on the neighboring island of Barbados. Google did better, putting the links to the Barbados resort much lower on the page.

There's a gear icon on the top right of each Brave Search results window — click it and you'll see how many of the search results were Brave-only. For "fish," Brave retrieved 97% of its own results. However, for "Calliaqua," Brave still returned 97% of its own results, which is pretty impressive.

Optional collection of user browsing data

Brave also announced the launch of the Web Discovery Project, an opt-in setting to the Brave browser that sends anonymized usage data to the company, ostensibly to fine-tune the search engine. It can work no matter which search engine you have set as your preferred default, which leads us to wonder if it might also be used to fine-tune ad results.

To opt into the Web Discovery Project, go into the Settings as above. The toggle switch is right under the search-engine selector.

After you've used one of the best website builders to create your site, and ensured it's hosted by one of the best web hosting services, you'll want to attract more visitors. To do this, of the first things you’ll need to undertake is to improve your website’s ranking on Google. 

This process, called search engine optimization (SEO), is a crucial element of managing a successful site or online store. Many things have been and continue to be said about SEO, including that it's more luck than skill, or that it’s a pay-to-play system, where the highest-paying sites get the best visibility. 

Neither of these statements are true, and in reality you can improve rankings and traffic with several basic SEO tips. We outline a series of these here, which you can take on to improve your overall strategy, and thus ensure that your site is ranked prominently on Google searches. 

SEO tips: What are organic results?

When someone makes a Google search, they are shown two types of results: paid results and organic results.

Paid results are those from websites that have paid Google directly for their site to be shown above organic results. Studies have shown that while this is one way to increase traffic to your site, Google users prefer to click on organic results.

Organic results are not paid for, and are determined by a variety of factors, including the page’s content and metadata, and how closely these relate to the search query. Therefore, the goal of SEO is to increase the number of organic results that lead to visits to your website.

How search engines determine what pages to show and how to show them is complicated, and goes well beyond this article’s scope. However, a few essential points should be made.

First, search engines use bots or computer programs to trawl the web, following links and visiting all publicly accessible websites. They then use this information to build enormous indexes that are consulted each time an internet user performs a Google search.

Once a user has entered a query, the search engine will refer to these extensive indexes, incorporating tens or hundreds of different factors into complex ranking algorithms. These, in turn, determine what content to display on the search results page. PageRank, Google’s preferred algorithm, relies on over 200 different metrics to determine Google search rankings.

You can leverage these hundreds of metrics to improve your website’s Google ranking. Although we won’t be able to look at all 200, we’ll discuss the most important ones. 

9 steps to success 

Let’s look at nine essential steps that you can take to improve your website’s Google ranking.

1. Creating a sitemap

Creating a sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your website’s search rankings. This will enable Google’s bots to quickly and efficiently index your entire site, and ensure that no pages are missing (and cannot be found through searches). You can submit a sitemap file to Google via Search Central. 

2. Provide the necessary information to bots

Make sure you provide the necessary information to bots with a robots.txt file. More information is available on The Web Robots Page, but basically, keeping on the bots’ good side is one of the best things you can do to ensure your website features prominently in Google searches.

3. Delete duplicate content

Here’s a simple one: delete duplicate content. Search engine bots hate duplication, and it’s one of the easiest ways to see your site tumble down the Google search rankings. Some site managers think that creating pages designed to detect search engine bots is a good idea, but it will backfire and hurt your website’s SEO rankings. 

4. Create static versions of webpages

Although less crucial than in the past, it still helps to create static versions of your webpages. Static content is more easily interpreted by search engine bots, at least more efficiently than dynamic content.

5. Create permalinks using keywords

Create permalinks for your pages using keywords (for example: “/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/”). These will result in better search rankings than permalinks containing numbers or other random information. A good rule of thumb is that the more identifiable data you can provide the bot, the better.

6. Audit your internal linking

An organized website with clear internal linking architecture will have higher Google rankings. This means displaying important information on the homepage, and ensuring that similar content is grouped together on dedicated pages. A menu makes it easy for search engine bots to index your site.

7. Use keywords your audience is likely to search for

When creating text-based content, use keywords that your audience is likely to search for. These should be used throughout your text (don’t overdo it, though) and featured in the title of your article and its permalink. Remember: search engine bots can’t read images or text. If your posts have many pictures, videos, or screenshots of text, add captions or descriptions that bots will be able to interpret. 

8. Ensure keywords relate to business objectives

Make sure your keywords are related to your business objectives. If you don’t know which ones are most relevant to your field, look them up. Finding the right keywords is essential if you want to feature prominently on Google searches. 

9. Improve links into your website

One of the main ways that Google and other search engines rank content is by the number of sites that link to yours. If your webpages are frequently mentioned on other sites, your site will quickly begin shooting up the Google rankings.  However, this is not always simple, and entire businesses exist to increase the number of inbound links to your website.

Time to call an SEO expert?

While the advice in this article will undoubtedly help you improve your website’s Google rankings, there’s only so much that you can do yourself. SEO agencies or experts have worked in this field for years, and have an intuitive understanding of search engine algorithms.

Trustworthy SEO agencies will provide results-based testimonials that show how they improved a business’s SEO and Google rankings. However, be wary of SEO experts promising top-ranking Google results or radical increases in traffic to your site. Real SEO is a process of gradual improvement rather than overnight success.

A final point worth making is that when it comes to SEO, money can only get you so far. An in-house SEO strategy or a trustworthy SEO agency can certainly help you improve your Google search ranking. But the only guaranteed way to do this is to create high-quality content. Without that, even the best SEO strategy will only get you so far.

Further reading on SEO

To learn more about SEO and what affects it, read our articles explaining how web hosting affects SEO, and six essential Google tools you can use to improve web SEO.

It's useful to know how to delete Google Search history, as well as details of your activities in its many other apps and services. You can delete your history in dozens of different Google tools, including YouTube, Chrome, Google Drive, and Google Maps. 

But let's assume you want to focus on Google Search today. Here is how to delete your Google Search history for the past hour, the past day, for all time or for a specific time frame. We'll also show you how to delete specific search queries.

The steps below work the same in desktop browsers and on mobile devices.

Note: The advice in the first section will delete all Google activity for that period, not just your search history. If you'd rather just delete Search queries for the past hour or day, skip down to "How to delete specific Google Search queries."

How to delete Google Search history for the past hour or day

1. Sign into Gmail or your Google account.

2. Go to https://myactivity.google.com in your web browser on your computer or mobile device.

3. Click "Delete activity by" in left-hand navigation bar. To see the navbar on a mobile browser, tap the three horizontal lines next to 'My Activity' at the top left of the screen.

4. In the window that pops up, select "Last hour".

5. To delete your Google Search history for the past day, in the window that pops up, select "Last day."

How to delete Google Search history for all time

To delete your entire Google Search history since you started using the service (or since it started storing your data), first follow steps 1-3 as outlined above. Then do the following:

1. In the Delete Activity window that pops up, select "All time."

2. In the next window that opens, deselect "Select All" at the top right.

3. Select "Search."

4. Click "Next" at the bottom right of the window.

5. A window will open asking you confirm that you want to delete your search activity. Click "Delete" to confirm that you do, and clear your Google Search history.

How to delete Google Search history for a specific time frame

To delete your Google Search history for a specific time frame, first follow steps 1-3 in the first section of this guide. Then do the following:

1. In the window that pops up, select "Custom range."

2. Another window will open asking you to "Choose which days to delete." Enter a date range and click "Next."

3. In the next window that pops up, deselect "Select All" at the top right.

4. Select "Search."

5. Click "Next" at the bottom right of the window.

6. A window will open asking you confirm that you want to do this. Click "Delete."

How to delete Google Search history - delete specific queries

1. Select "Item view" in the left-hand navigation bar of your My Google Activity page.

2. Select "Filter by date and product" in the main part of the page.

3. Tick the box labeled "Search" in the filter-results window that opens.

4. If your search query was made in the past few days, skip to Step 6.

5. If the search query was more than a few days ago, but you remember when it was, you can narrow down the time frame. 

Enter starting and ending dates for the time frame. The default time frame is "All."

6. Click "Apply". A list of everything you've ever searched for during the specified time frame will appear in reverse chronological order. 

7. Find the search query you want to delete and click the "X" next to it.

8. A window will open asking you to confirm your choice. Click "Delete" to wipe the search query from your Google account.

More Google tips

We've got other tips for protecting your privacy on Google, such as how to delete the last 15 minutes of your search history and how to remove your contact details from Google Search. We've also got tips for Google Maps users who want to look up their location history and how to enable Google package tracking.

Update: This feature is now rolling out to Android devices as well

Google has introduced the ability for users to delete the 15 minutes of their mobile search history on iPhone. For now, the feature is exclusively available on iOS devices, but an Android rollout is expected later in the year. 

This new feature was originally announced at Google’s I/O 2021 event and will operate alongside the platform’s existing auto-delete features. Currently, you can choose to have your search data auto-scrubbed every three, 18, or 36 months, but now you can also remove the last quarter of an hour if you need to quickly remove your most recent search history. 

This feature will be useful in several scenarios. Perhaps you’ve been browsing for a present for someone on a shared device, or maybe you don’t want whatever you’ve recently been researching to be picked up by the Google algorithm. We’ve all made some questionable web searches in the past; we’re not judging. 

Deleting the last 15 minutes of search is a little easier than constantly having to remember to switch to an incognito tab ahead of time. Plus, its integration within the Google iOS app makes it a feature that is extremely user-friendly. 

How to delete the last 15 minutes of your search history

After announcing this new feature at I/O 2021, Google has rolled out the ability to delete the last 15 minutes of search history on iOS. Here’s how to scrub your recent searches:  

1. Open the Google app on your iOS device and click the account icon in the top right-hand corner. 

2. From the account settings window, you will see a subheading for Search history and underneath that the option to delete the last 15 minutes of your search history. Click “Delete last 15 mins”. 

3. You should now see a notification alerting you that your last 15 minutes of search is being deleted. If you change your mind you have a small window to click Undo before this pop-up window disappears and your recent search history is permanently erased.  

More Google Search tips

We've also got tips for deleting your entire Google search history as well as how you can remove your contact details from Google Search. If you use Google Maps, you'll also want to know how to look up your location history.

The company behind the privacy-oriented Brave web browser has launched the beta test of its own search engine, appropriately called Brave Search.

Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich, formerly of Mozilla, said in a blog post yesterday (June 22) that the Brave search engine will give users "the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech." 

To that end, the company said that Brave Search will not track or profile users nor will it rely on other search engines for "common queries" (more on that in a bit). Brave Search also promises to be transparent about how it gathers and ranks search results.

We gave Brave Search a whirl and found that it holds up well against Google and Bing, with similar results and presentation of information. You can access Brave Search at https://search.brave.com/, and it can also be set as the default search engine in the Brave web browser.

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Does Brave Search really protect your privacy?

Whether Brave Search will protect your privacy is hard to measure at this early stage. It certainly does join Bing as another viable alternative to Google. (Bing is a much better search engine than you may realize.) 

As for DuckDuckGo, the original privacy-oriented search engine, that feels like a throwback to the '90s, with mainly text-based search results but little else. Brave Search feels more like Google or Bing.

DuckDuckGo does have a "Recent News" box high on the page and an information box to the right side, as do the others. But Brave Search adds features that Bing and Google also include, such as a "People Also Ask" box for related searches, a box for video results, and a larger infobox than what DuckDuckGo provides. (Bing has the best infoboxes of all.)

Brave Search's results also give you about 18 text links per page, as opposed to 8 or 9 for Google, between 7 and 10 for Bing and 10 for DuckDuckGo. Generic queries, such as for "fish," let you toggle between universal and local results, such as for fish markets and restaurants. Results pages have about as many images as Google's results but fewer than Bing's.

Brave does dip into other search engines occasionally

Brave Search is based on the Tailcat search engine, which was originally created for an aborted German web browser called Cliqz. Brave announced in March of this year that it had bought Tailcat. 

Eich told Tom's Guide then that Brave planned to use Tailcat to build "the first multi-platform, private, browser/search alternative to the Big Tech platforms." He pointed out that DuckDuckGo "relies on Bing as the search engine under its hood."

That may be true, but Brave Search isn't quite free of Bing and Google either. 

"For some features, like searching for images, Brave Search will fetch results from Microsoft Bing," according to yesterday's Brave blog post. 

A long explanation of Brave Search's methods on a separate page states that while "Brave is fully capable of answering 99% of queries completely on its own," in actuality, a small percentage of results for certain queries may end of being "fetched anonymously from third parties, namely Google and Bing." 

This is done because Brave "may not be completely confident in our results to be at the level of quality you'd expect," especially during the beta testing.

Near the bottom of every Bing search-results page, there's a link to "find elsewhere," with links to the same search query you typed into Brave Search as resolved by Google, Bing and another search engine called Mojeek.

However, every query we typed into Brave Search, even one for an obscure town on a Caribbean island we're familiar with, came back with "All results from Brave." That was pretty impressive.

You can check to see how many results are Brave's, and how many are from other search engines, by clicking the Info link near the top of every Brave Search results page. Clicking the three stacked lines in the top right corner of the results page gives you the "results independence" percentage as a circle graph.

The upshot is that there's plenty of life in web interfaces beyond Google. You should check out Brave Search, as well as the Brave web browser, to see for yourself.

• Best Android browsers

Most modern businesses have a website that operates as a digital storefront for products and services. After you choose one of the best website builders to create your company site, it’s important to regularly update and maintain it in order to maximize your visibility, and ensure that your website SEO (search engine optimization) is up to date. 

It may seem like another irritating task on your business’ to-do list, but ensuring your website is regularly updated has many benefits for growth and will save time, and often money, in the long run. 

Customer perception of your brand

Regularly updating website content not only ensures that your offerings are fresh, but also establishes your company’s authority in the marketplace. By regularly auditing and updating your blog posts, web pages, and other online content, you can finetune the effectiveness of your company message, and improve website SEO. 

Regular updating also gives you the opportunity to check that any calls to action and lead magnets are performing well, and to remove anything that is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose or is outdated. Learning how to write a blog post with optimal SEO might prove helpful when it comes to producing your own blog content.

Another thing to note is that a consistent stream of updates signals to both current customers and potential new ones that the business is active, and ready to take orders or provide services. 

Website SEO boost

SEO is always changing, and it is reported that Google changes its algorithms up to 600 times a year. By regularly updating the content on a website, and measuring the impact that slight changes make to organic traffic and search engine visibility, you can ensure that your website is optimized at all times.

It’s also a good idea to make updating and checking your website SEO rankings a regular business habit. This will help save time and reduce costs, as you’ll regularly perform small actions that could easily become much larger tasks later on. 

Activities such as cleaning up broken links will give an almost instant boost to your search engine ranking and domain authority - factors that directly affect where your website appears in search engine results.

Having an ongoing grasp of your website’s SEO status also allows you to set goals and marketing metrics, providing greater clarity and control over how your site is performing. And by keeping on top of your digital analytics, you can identify high-performing visitor entry points and strategically plan ways to maximize these to drive more traffic: and, as a result, increase website conversions.

Improved user experience (UX)

Updating your website regularly provides potential customers with a better user experience. Any issues that arise with browser updates will be easy to identify when a site is regularly checked. This then means that smaller adjustments can be made quickly without the need to invest in a larger, more expensive, redesign later.

The loading speed of a website should also be monitored routinely. While customers are drawn to visually appealing websites, if these take a long time to load content, they will become frustrated, and this can impact sales directly. 

Regularly reviewing your website’s landing pages and checking against analytics will help you to identify areas that have high user exit rates. This data can provide information on what isn’t capturing a potential customer’s interest, and provide clues on how to keep them on the site longer, so they may be pushed through the sales funnel to the purchase point.

Social media content

You can also use your website updates as marketing collateral for social media platforms. When you share a consistent stream of informative blog posts or new product launches to these wider audiences, you can quickly add more authority to your business, and provide a call to action for individuals to visit your website.

Security

Keeping a close eye on your website’s framework can also protect and prevent a website from experiencing any security issues, such as hacks. 

If you check the security and permissions of your website, and audit your website content periodically, you have a greater chance of catching any vulnerabilities before they are exposed. 

While checking these things alone won’t be able to identify every potential threat or hack, it greatly diminishes the likelihood of any security breaches to your website.  

Conclusion

For any business looking to drive growth and ensure it has the best digital presence possible, regularly updating its website’s content and infrastructure is essential.

Creating new content doesn’t need to be time-consuming or cost much, either. Done correctly, it can be a cheap and easy way to generate more sales, build a stronger relationship with the customer base, and identify any changes and trends ahead of competitors.

Further reading on website builders and web hosting

Another factor to consider with SEO is your web hosting provider: we asked does web hosting affect SEO, and outlined five web hosting factors that can affect the SEO of your website. Make sure to choose your preferred service from the best web hosting providers, too.

When it comes to content meanwhile, we explored six ways to get free website content for your site legally and without fuss.

Google has just introduced password protection to your "Web and Activity" log, which is the page that shows just about everything you’ve been doing online through Google services.

This is good news for privacy-conscious users as the activity page contains a treasure trove of user data, including YouTube viewing history and Google searches, among other meaty data deposits. It’s also accessible to any device where you’ve logged in with your Google account — in other words, very open to prying eyes. 

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• Plus: Tesla Roadster 2022 goes on display in LA — here’s how to go and see it

Most of our digital lives rely on a Google device or product in some way or another to navigate the web. Whether this comes from one of the best Android phones or from the Chrome browser, our activity is compiled and stashed away to review later on through the My Activity service page.

My Activity doesn't just contain YouTube and search data, though: it also keeps a log of your daily app usage or anything you've browsed on Google Maps. Because all of this data is confidential, Google has created an extra layer of security to keep things strictly locked down.

Switching on Google's extra layer of security

Beginning last week, when you visit the 'My Activity' page (via 9to5Google), a small notification now appears, saying: "Safer with Google - You can add more security to My Activity by turning on extra verification." This bubble points to a new section under "Google protects your privacy and security."

In this new section, you have the option to Manage or Dismiss within the bubble or click Manage My Activity verification. From there, a separate pop-up window appears giving you the option to "Require extra verification," which bolts on the new password-protect function.

Turning this in will require anyone trying to access the My Activity section to click on a Verify button and put in the correct Google account password, before they're granted access to the treasure trove of user data.  

According to Google, "if you turn on extra verification Google will make sure it’s really you before you can see or delete your full history on My Activity. This can help keep your history safer on shared devices."

An important caveat here is that the "setting only applies to My Activity," which is Google's way of basically saying that your history may still appear in other Google products. So, beware.

It's good to see Google finessing the smaller parts of its services, especially when it comes to security measures. The new feature, of course, more widely echoes its drive to improve user security as highlighted at Google I/O 2021, alongside news from earlier this month of mandatory two-factor authentication to firm up users' account security.

More: Chromebook vs Windows 10: Which is best for you?

Google searching just got a little bit easier on your desktop, thanks to the introduction of a brand new keyboard shortcut. The best part is that it’s not even very difficult to remember.

If you’ve ever found yourself at the bottom of a Google Search page and had to go back to the search bar, this is the tip for you. Instead of using the mouse cursor as you normally would, just hit the ‘/’ key, and Google will take you there right away. 

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It really is that simple. No matter where you are on a Google search page, hitting the / key will pop up the search bar. That way you can refine your current search, or start over from scratch.

According to 9to5Google, Google is informing users of this shortcut with a brief pop-up in the bottom-left hand corner of your screen. We can confirm that the we've seen the pop-up and that the shortcut works properly.

For most people, this will only save a couple of seconds, though that savings will add up over time. And for those that can’t or don’t navigate with a mouse, this is going to make Google search more accessible. 

Google has long-supported using the Tab key to navigate without a mouse, but getting around is a slower process. By letting users immediately jump back to the search bar with the / key, Google is saving keyboard users a considerable amount of time finding what they need.

So go ahead and check out this new shortcut right now. You might be surprised at how convenient it is, even if you are normally happy to use the mouse. Just be aware this is a desktop-only feature. Mobile users are still going to have to scroll back to the top of the screen as always.

• More: Google Maps vs Apple Maps: Which is best?

An enormous amount of content is published on the internet every day, so if you want to attract readers to your blog, you’ll need more than the best website builders and a topic to talk about—you’ll also need to understand SEO, or search engine optimization, as it's a key part of how to write a blog post.

SEO is the process of tailoring your blog post to make it more visible on search engines such as Google and Bing. These search engines analyze web pages for certain indicators of content and quality. If you learn how this works, you can implement a few simple tricks to move your posts higher up in the search results. 

In this feature, we show you how to write a blog post with SEO in mind, in order to bring in more readers - you might also want to peruse the best free blogging sites, should you be looking for a new home for your writing.

How to write a blog post - Step 1: Have a clear purpose

Before you write your post, think about what its purpose is. There should be one clear, specific topic that your article is about. Consider what kind of person you want to read your article, what they should get out of it, and what search terms they might use if they were looking for it. Answering these questions will help you write the article and implement the following steps.

Step 2: Structure your article for readability

Search engines can tell how readable an article is—that is, how easy it is for someone to read through and understand its points. A major aspect of this is giving your writing a clear structure. There should be an introduction, a main body of text, and a conclusion. 

It should also be divided into paragraphs, preferably with section headers. Short paragraphs work better, as they are easier to scan for information, especially on mobile phone screens. Similarly, short sentences are preferred to long, complicated ones. 

Try to use transition words, like “similarly” and “and,” to connect content points.

Step 3: Use a strong focus keyword

Many blogging sites let you set a focus keyword, which is the main search term that you want leading to the post. Choose one that’s specific to the post and not used by any other posts on your website; after all, you don’t want your pages to compete with each other.

A useful trick is to use a long-tail keyword, which is a longer term, and often a question. Make sure to include your focus keyword throughout your article. For example, the long-tail keyword of this article is, “how to write a blog post,” which we used in the title, the introduction, and this very sentence.

Step 4: Use topic tags

Besides your focus keywords, you can add tags to your blog posts. These are like category titles, which organize all the content on your website. Think of them like the index words in a book—readers interested in a topic can find all your articles about it using the tag.

If an article covers several topics, you can include multiple tags. However, don’t use tags too similar to each other, like “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization.” Search engines and readers are both clever enough to interpret this as you trying to trick them by listing the same content multiple times.

It’s useful to have a set list of tags for your site, and restrict yourself to that list.

Step 5: Have an effective title

Choosing your title carefully is important, because not only do search engines use the title to determine the article’s content, but it’s also the first thing that viewers see in the search results - so it plays a major role in their decision to click through.

It’s useful to include your focus keyword in the title. Google cuts titles off after around 60 characters, though, so make sure your keyword comes before that point. It’s also a good idea to use emotive power words. Think about how words like “easy,” “spectacular,” and “thought-provoking” might grab a reader’s attention.

Step 6: Optimize the meta description

The meta description is a summary of your article’s content, and it appears below the title in search engine results. In an engaging and concise way, summarize why readers should click through. Ideally, your meta description should be limited to 155 characters, and include the focus keyword.

Recently, Google has started displaying parts of the article relevant to the searched terms underneath titles, rather than the meta description, so some SEO experts say that the meta description isn’t as useful as it used to be. But it’s still worth the short amount of time that it takes to write it.

Step 7: Use images effectively

Since the human mind often finds it easier to parse visually appealing content, adding images to illustrate and help explain your point makes your articles more engaging. Consequently, they’ll be placed higher in search results. You can also embed videos for extra engagement.

It’s important to add alt text to your images. This should be a concise, specific description of the image. It tells the search engine what the image shows, and helps it rank in image results pages. Also, the image can be described to users with slow internet connections or screen readers. 

Step 8: Link to related content

In the introduction to this feature, we linked to another article on Tom’s Guide. There are two reasons to do this. First, it allows readers to discover other content on the site that may be relevant to them. The other reason is SEO-related.

Search engines can tell if an article is linked to and from other web pages. To the algorithm, this makes the article seem more valid and relevant, so it will be moved up in the search results. It’s useful to include internal links wherever possible in your blog posts—your pages will support each other’s SEO scores.

Summary

SEO involves a certain amount of technical understanding of keywords, meta descriptions, image alt text, and how search engine algorithms interpret all this data. However, most of it is about simple readability. The more engaging your content is to readers, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

If you follow all the tips and tricks that we’ve listed here on how to write a blog post, you should be able to significantly improve your blog post’s standing in the search results, and attract large numbers of new readers in no time.

Further reading on website builders

For further advice, see our feature on the biggest WordPress website mistakes, and how to fix them. If you go with WordPress for your new site via the best website builders for WordPress, make sure you sign up to the best WordPress hosting offered by the best web hosting services, to ensure you've got the best chance to succeed.