More than 650 members of the Alphabet Workers Union, the recently-established minority union made up mostly of Google engineering folks, demanded in a letter to company execs that their company change its broad policies in the wake of the end of Roe v. Wade.
Rick and Morty season six is nearly here—so now feels like the perfect time to look back on season five and recall the most important life lessons conveyed by the Adult Swim hit’s previous installment, be they raunchy, sly, clever, thoughtful, or plainly obvious… sometimes all at the same time.
The Cleveland Browns quarterback was accused of sexual misconduct by two dozen women while he played for the Houston Texans.
Google says it’s doing more to downrank low-quality content that’s designed primarily to generate traffic through search engine optimization. Over the coming months, it will roll out several updates to Search aimed at making it easier for people to find helpful content created primarily for humans rather than the attention of algorithms.
Starting next week, Google will unleash what it’s calling the Helpful Content Update. This is designed to downgrade unoriginal content deemed to be of low quality. In particular, it will try to surface better-quality educational materials, along with more useful entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.
As an example, the company notes that folks searching for info about a new movie will be more likely to see results for feature authentic and fresh information, rather than ones that offer aggregated reviews with no unique perspectives or details. In general, the aim is to surface more results with in-depth insights and better quality content. Google says that, as with its other systems, it plans to refine this approach over time.
The company has offered some guidance to content creators in terms of what its search engine prioritizes. Google has long urged them to publish content designed for people while still using SEO best practices. Among the factors the company suggests they keep in mind is whether their intended audience would find the content useful and showing first-hand expertise and in-depth knowledge of a subject.
It suggests avoiding “extensive automation” to churn out content on a broad range of topics or writing something with a specific word count in mind after hearing that’s what Google looks for. Removing unhelpful content from elsewhere on a website will help too.
In addition, Google is planning another update for Search with the goal of surfacing original and high-quality product reviews (such as the ones you’ll find on Engadget). This measure, which the company will roll out in the coming weeks, follows a series of updates Google rolled out last year to bubble up more useful and in-depth reviews in results.
Improving Search is an ongoing mission for Google. The company notes that it made thousands of changes to its Search systems last year. It said those were based on the results of hundreds of thousands of quality tests, some of which incorporated feedback from human reviewers.
At first glance, the story looks like something your aunt might post on her Facebook from her local newspaper. “Midland County judge ‘pardons’ jaywalking puppy,” the headline reads, with a photo of a startled-looking Pomeranian behind a microphone, seemingly on a witness stand. The post details how a Texas judge found…
The world of Middle-earth and its adaptive iterations has had a long history of strange and peculiar owners, even before Peter Jackson’s iconic movie trilogies came along and made that even more complicated. Now, a huge sea-change in the rights to Tolkien’s work has made things even more complex… thanks to a video…
“If I made myself sicker by going out there and promoting it, I wouldn’t be acting true to myself,” the “21 Jump Street” actor said.
“Would that it were so simple,” the young, aspiring western actor Hobie Doyle mouths in the Coen brothers film Hail, Caesar! He struggles endlessly to portray a style of high-society speech far away from his roots as a simple good ol’ boy. Hail, Caesar! is currently watchable on Netflix, though recent reports show…
Nexus Mods, a popular mod database, has posted a strongly worded update about the Spider-Man Remastered patch that was created to remove Pride flags in-game. The website’s administrator, Dark0ne, has revealed that the mod was uploaded by a sock puppet under the name “Mike Hawk.” They said the fact that it was added to the database by a secondary account shows the uploader’s intent to troll and demonstrates their understanding that it would not be allowed on the database. As such, the website has decided to remove the patch from its repository and to ban both the user’s main account and sock puppet.
Spider-Man Remastered was released for the PC a few days ago. It’s a refresh of the original title developed by Insomniac Games, which has since been purchased by Sony Interactive, and was released back in 2019. In the game, you’ll see Pride flags around New York as you swing around the city as Spider-Man, and some players were apparently offended by their presence. The mod Mike Hawk released replaces those Pride flags with the flag of the USA.
“We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity,” Dark0ne wrote in their post. They vowed to do a better job of moderating their website and ensuring that their policy is followed more closely going forward. The administrator said that the website will take action if someone uploads a file with the intent to be deliberately against inclusivity and/or diversity. Based on how the website addressed this particular issue, it will likely hand out bans in the future if they’re warranted. Of course, Dark0ne and their team can only police what’s uploaded on Nexus Mods. Seeing as it’s one of the largest repositories around, though, its team’s stance could make an impact and help slow the spread of certain game modifications.
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