It might seem like there’s already tons of ads on Facebook, but the company is still searching for new places to put more of them.
The latest method that’s materializing is in search results, where Facebook is now experimenting with ads, the company confirmed.
“We’re running a small test to place ads in Facebook search results, and we’ll be evaluating whether these ads are beneficial for people and businesses before deciding whether to expand it,” Facebook product manager Zoheb Hajiyani said in a statement.
Though not the first time Facebook had dabbled in search ads, it’s a significant move for the company, which is facing declining revenue growth.
For now, the ads will be an extension of those in Facebook’s News Feed. They’ll only be available to a limited number of people in the automotive and retail industry, according to the company. Facebook’s early partners can opt in to the new ads via the same ad manager tools they use to promote ads in the News Feed.
The new ad format is the latest sign that Facebook is still eagerly searching for new places to put ads. The company has been warning investors for some time that ads in News Feed are pretty much at capacity and that they still haven’t figured out how to monetize Stories effectively.
Combine that with slowing user growth, and the only option left open to the company is to tap into new places on Facebook, which are not currently being monetized. (Likewise, the company is also eyeing new places to put ads in Instagram.)
So search, which is featured prominently and used by just about everyone on the service, is certainly a promising place to start.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s long-awaited took place on Tuesday.
Pichai testified before Congress on , the controversial product, and perceived . But, there was one more pressing concern that took center stage to those watching the hearing: Several members of Congress, at least on the House Judiciary Committee, have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technology.
The main topic of the hearing — anti-conservative bias within Google’s search engine — really puts how little Congress understands into perspective. Early on in the hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith claimed as fact that 96 percent of Google search results come from liberal sources. Besides being with a simple search of your own, Google’s search algorithm bases search rankings on attributes such as backlinks and domain authority. Partisanship of the news outlet does not come into play. Smith asserted that he believe the results are being manipulated, regardless of being told otherwise.
Rep. Steve Chabot brought us one of the most unfortunate self-owns of the hearing while discussing Google search and anti-conservative bias. Bringing up his own personal experience, Chabot questioned Pichai on why Google returned so much negative criticism on Republicans’ bill to repeal and replace Obamacare last year. Unaware of the implication that so many outlets reported on the bill in this way simply because, maybe, it was just bad, Chabot went on to bring up a similar experience with the GOP tax plan.
When Iowa Rep. Steve King demanded to know why a nasty image of the Congressman would appear on his granddaughter’s phone while she was playing a game, Pichai had to point out that Google doesn’t make the iPhone. King’s response? It could have been an Android!
But, not to be outdone by his peers, the most cringeworthy moment of the entire hearing has to go to Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert. The Republican Congressman was upset with the fact that Google shows Wikipedia in its search results. Gohmert proceeded to throw himself under the bus in a bizarre moment where he blamed the free online encyclopedia for removing edits his staff makes to his own Wikipedia page. Remember that this is being said at a hearing on political bias on the internet!
It should be that a majority of our elected officials aren’t the . But, while one can argue that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are only around a decade old, Google search has been a part of our internet lives for over .
There are certainly many concerns and critiques to be had over algorithms and data collection when it comes to Google and its products like Google Search and Google Ads. Sadly, not much time was spent on this substance at Tuesday’s hearing. Google-owned YouTube, the second most trafficked website in the world after Google, was barely addressed at the hearing tool.
Perhaps these important topics will be better addressed at Pichai’s next Congressional hearing. Members of the incoming freshman class of Congress next year are younger and, seemingly, more . Maybe they can even invite YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to that hearing too.
NASA wants Steph Curry to know that yes, the moon landing was real, and they’re even inviting him to check out some space rocks to prove it.
During an interview on the podcast “Winging It,” the Golden State Warriors star revealed that he doesn’t believe the United States has been to the moon.
About 46 minutes into the episode, he abruptly changed the conversation topic from what sounds dinosaurs made to space exploration.
“We ever been to the moon?” Curry asked.
The group, including Atlanta Hawks players Vince Carter and Kent Bazemore, and Curry’s teammate Andre Iguodala, concluded with a unanimous “Nope.”
“They’re going to come get us,” Curry added. “Sorry, I don’t want to start conspiracies.”
“Winging It” co-host Annie Finberg was skeptical, which led to a group discussion on conspiracy theories. They floated the belief that director Stanley Kubrick staged the entire moon landing.
People took to Twitter to tell Curry that the moon landing did in fact happen, and some compared it to Kyrie Irving’s statements believing the Earth is flat.
Hey Steph – i love watching you play – you’re amazing. But kids are joking about your grip on reality with bizarre belief the NASA moon missions never happened. Kids look up to you – and it’s not cool what you’re doing. It’s great to see you back on the court ! #StephCurry
@StephenCurry30 Please don’t be stupid. I have great admiration for you, but that goes away if you really start spewing this shit. People died in our efforts to get us to the moon. When you proliferate this stupid idea, you are, in the very least, disrespecting their memories. pic.twitter.com/zfddsj2OXp
NASA, meanwhile, took a different approach. They invited Curry to see the evidence himself.
“We’d love for Mr. Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets,” NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told the New York Times. “We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we’re doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay.”
In an email to Mashable, Beutel added that there is “lots of evidence NASA landed 12 American astronauts on the Moon from 1969 – 1972” and pointed to an article by NASA debunking the conspiracy theories.
Citing the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which photographed the Apollo landing sites, the article says “well characterized, high resolution images” makes it “much harder to remain a doubter today.”
Curry hasn’t made any announcements about visiting the lab yet, but did tweet a cheeky response to the invitation.
Melting trends in the Arctic today are increasingly stark. The 2018 Arctic Report Card, produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), depicts a thawing world that is continuing to warm and melt at an unprecedented pace.
“I think that the report demonstrated everything we’ve been seeing for the last decade,” Jeremy Mathis, a NOAA Arctic scientist who was not involved with this report, said in an interview.
“The changes in the Arctic are happening faster than they’re happening anywhere else on the rest of the planet.”
The driver of the Arctic’s vanishing sea ice is warming air. Here, the trends are clear. Air temperatures in the Arctic over the last five years have been the five highest on record, since 1900, the report emphasizes.
But in the Arctic, this warming is especially magnified.
The vast Arctic Ocean is subject to an unstoppable “albedo effect,” in which vanishing sea ice sets the stage for more melting of ice to occur, in a vicious cycle.
Specifically, bright white sea ice has a high albedo, or ability to reflect sunlight. But when the ice melts, it leaves the dark ocean to absorb heat, which then warms both the oceans and surrounding air. In turn, this melts more ice.
The consequences are clear. Sea ice is covering less and less area, commonly called “low ice extents.”
“The 12 lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last 12 years,” the report underscores.
The red line shows the declining sea ice minimum, which occurs in September.
There isn’t just less Arctic sea ice — the nature of the ice has changed profoundly too. The older, strongest ice — which is more resilient to warming temperatures — is vanishing.
In 1985, the oldest ice (which is ice greater than four years old) comprised 16 percent of Arctic’s total sea ice, the report concludes. But by March 2018, the old ice made up just 0.9 percent of the Arctic’s ice, the report said.
That’s a 95 percent reduction.
“That older, thicker ice showed very clear signs of melting this year,” said Mathis.
He noted the melting of the some of the most ancient, formidable ice in the Arctic — an area of ice north of Greenland that’s about the size of Indiana.
That melting is no easy feat. This ice is, on average, 16 feet thick, and can grow to as much as 65 feet thick.
All signs point towards the reality that this trend will continue, which means an Arctic dominated by young, thin ice — ice that is all the more susceptible to today’s accelerating climate change.
Soon enough, this means an ice-free, or nearly ice-free Arctic.
“We’re headed towards an ice-free summer in the not-too-distant future,” said Mathis. “We’re on the order of a decade or two away.”
Stopping this trend, in the short term or coming decade, will be nearly impossible. This is because humanity has loaded the atmosphere with the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas — in some 15 million years. It won’t simply fade away in so short a time.
What’s more, climate and economics researchers expect modern civilization to increase our carbon output over the coming decade.
But in the longer term — to stave off even more dire warming in the Arctic — the solution is simple and promoted by scientists everywhere: We must reduce our global carbon emissions in an extreme way.
An increasingly ice-free Arctic will certainly open up economic opportunities, including those for commercial shipping.
But this comes with a big cost. The Arctic, a dominant region of Earth, has sway over the greater globe.
“We know climate change in the Arctic can have a destabilizing effect on weather and climate patterns around the Northern Hemisphere,” said Mathis. “We’re going to have to pay attention to those trade-offs.”
Of note, the Arctic report card details a growing understanding of how Arctic warming has a significant effect on the jet stream, high atmospheric winds that cut directly across the United States.
A warm Arctic reduces the temperature difference between the middle-latitudes, where the lower 48 states lie, and the Arctic. This tends to dampen these winds and allows the jet stream to bend, in big waves.
“The Arctic meltdown may also be contributing to summer heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and flooding over Northern Hemisphere continents,” Jennifer Francis, a marine scientist at Woods Hole Research Center, wrote in the report.
This weaker jet stream, pushed up higher into California, is already making for an extended, damaging fire season in California, scientists say.
A wavier jet stream over North America.
“…it’s becoming ice-crystal-clear that change in the far north will increasingly affect us all,” Francis writes.
Elsewhere in the Arctic Report Card, NOAA outlines more examples of widespread change — some of it beneficial, but mostly not.
With depleted sea ice comes a boom in ocean plankton, which means more ocean creatures sucking historically high carbon dioxide out of the air. Some of these blooms of ocean life, however, are toxic.
Elsewhere, the iconic grazing animals of the high north, like reindeer, have seen their populations plummet by half. Microscopic plastic contamination is climbing in the Arctic, in some places increasing 20 times over the last decade.
Some of these changes are easier to see than others. But dramatically vanished sea ice, stoked by climate change, is an easily-visible, growing reality.
“The Arctic is a great indicator of where the global climate is headed,” said Mathis.
Unlike the gregarious, extroverted Pepper robot seen roaming in shopping malls and interacting with customers and answering questions, Tally quietly does its thing with the occasional beeping sound.
The unobtrusive self-driving machine can be spotted at the first U.S. location of the French sporting goods store Decathlon in downtown San Francisco. The lanky machine on wheels is the first fully autonomous inventory robot, meaning it roves aisles and tracks RFID chips on nearly 10,000 products.
It’s not supposed to really interact with customers – that’s a duty left to the store’s workers. But it’s friendly enough, with a short message on it that says “Hi, I’m Tally!” and digital eyes to give it a human-like appearance as it roams around.
“Hi, I’m Tally.”
Image: sasha lekach / mashable
It’s something like a Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner that you’re supposed to ignore as it works. From Simbe Robotics, Tally uses LiDAR, RealSense 3D sensor tech from Intel, cameras, and computer vision to check inventory and pricing. It can also flag any items in the wrong place. It “sees” obstacles blocking its way and is programmed to move away from crowds of people.
Tally is in other grocery stores and retail shops and has logged 10,000 miles of inventory checks and constant scanning. The new partnership with the athletic equipment store means more Tallys could appear at more stores as the French company expands into the U.S. Another Bay Area store is opening next year.
Instead of being relegated to a store room or a massive warehouse, Tally is out in the open, working alongside real, human workers. It doesn’t seem that distracting and the workers seem to appreciate that it’s doing work that they’d have to do (like manually counting items and marking what’s low and needs replenishing).
Even if you physically go to a store, the experience has become even more digital than it used to be.
Conservative representatives hammered on allegations of anti-conservative bias, which Pichai refuted. Other issues included the Google Plus data breach, Russian manipulation of the platform, and even how search fundamentally works.
“We bring choice, transparency, and control to our users,” Pichai said. “These values are built into all of our products.”
Pichai was categorical when faced with the allegation that Google Search favors liberal content.
“Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment,” Pichai said.
Conservative representatives cited one study in particular that said that Google Search’s political bias swayed voters in favor of Hillary Clinton. Pichai said that Google took issue with that study’s methodology, and refuted its results. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, replied: “What does methodology have to do with the fact that 96 percent of search results were from liberal sources?”
Pichai echoed the sentiment again and again that Google does not manipulate its algorithm based on political bias. Representatives were not satisfied with his remarks.
“Somebody out there is doing something,” Ohio Republican Steve Chabot said. “I think it’s happening.”
Beyond allegations of bias, questions were far reaching. When Rep. Jackson Lee asked Pichai about the planned Chinese search engine and how it would impact human rights, Pichai said that Google had no plans to launch a search product in China.
“Right now we have no plans to launch in China, Pichai said. “We don’t have a search product there. Getting access to information is an important human right. But right now there are no plans to launch search in China.”
Whatever year-end content you’re devouring this December, let’s be real – you want to know about your year in Netflix. The streaming service is notoriously private about numbers, but did release a list of the top TV and film titles we binged this year.
Though Netflix released dozens of original films this year, the year-end press release doesn’t rank overall viewership; it only names the three that were rewatched with the highest frequency.
Of course, social media has to be a metric, so Netflix also investigated the Instagram audience growth of stars who appeared in a Netflix film or series during the year. Yup, we follow all of them.
The Fab Five (Queer Eye)
Lana Condor (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before)
Joel Courtney (The Kissing Booth)
Miguel Herrán (Elite / La Casa de Papel)
Jaime Lorente Lopez (Elite / La Casa de Papel)
Maria Pedraza (Elite / La Casa de Papel)
Noah Centineo (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Sierra Burgess is a Loser)
Joey King (The Kissing Booth)
Hannah Gadsby (Nanette)
Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina)
For shows, Netflix revealed which series were the most binged – as in, highest watch time per viewing session. You’d think half-hour shows would have the edge here, but gripping dramas like 13 Reasons Why and The Haunting of Hill House still made the list by getting viewers hooked.
Ah, December, a perfect time to sit back and reflect on what kind of porn you watched in 2018.
Pornhub, the online adult video site has released a nice, long look at the year across the site, and while there are a lot of things that seem typical for a porn site, there are a number of results that are pretty eye-catching.
For starters, Pornhub claims that by the time 2018 draws to a close, the site will have been visited 33.5 billion times this year, none of those by anyone you know, surely. In addition, the site averaged around 92 million visitors a day, which is equal to the combined populations of Canada, Australia, and Poland.
BILLIONS OF VIEWS.
As for what users were looking up, porn star and Donald Trump wooer Stormy Daniels was particularly popular in 2018, thanks to all of those headlines about her and Trump’s past tryst, topping the site’s list of “searches that defined 2018.” That list also includes your standard adult fare like “romantic” and “threesome” and gaming terms like “Fortnite” and “Bowsette.”
Fortnite even dominated porn in 2018
Of course, while Bowsette is a fan-made video game character, she’s not the only gaming character to see millions of video searches. Bowsette had the most searches at nearly 35 million but Overwatch’s Brigitte and Mercy, as well as Lara Croft were other top gaming-related searches. And in case you were wondering, Mario received 2.6 million searches and, yes, Pokémon characters also popped up on the list.
Not included: Toad.
As far as real people go, Stormy Daniels also rocketed to the top of the list for “most searched porn star” on the site, a jump of 671 spots over 2017. Stormy also ranked as the number one searched porn star in the United States, and beat out Kim Kardashian and Blac Chyna as the most-searched celebrity.
Stormy storms to the top of another chart
Not to be outdone, Fortnite-related searches jumped over 17,000 places to crack Pornhub’s top 15 search terms for 2018. That’s quite an active life for the game’s apparently many, many unauthorized, uh, fan videos.
One more note on the gaming end: in a bit of a surprising twist, it seems Super Mario’s Toad didn’t get the same boost from his appearance in the headlines as did his counterpart, Stormy Daniels. There’s always 2019, I guess.
Whether searching for these videos or maybe just doing some casual browsing as one does on Pornhub, users in the United States propelled our marvelous, not-at-all-in-crisis country into the top spot for yet another year, outpacing the other usual suspects like the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Canada.
America First!
There’s tons of other interesting data available with Pornhub’s full report, from which game console sees the most visits to the site (Playstation), to gender and age breakdowns (overwhelmingly male, a majority under 35), to what operating systems the visits come from (mostly Windows).
But my personal favorite is seeing what specific events caused the biggest drops and surges: Apple’s September live event and the Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Royal Wedding caused the biggest drops in the non-sports category.
The Royal Wedding really did dominate everything
Meanwhile, the Super Bowl was the U.S.-based sporting event that caused the biggest drop in traffic, while globally those honors went to the World Cup Final.
For all the fun stats, including which holidays cause the biggest traffic changes and where First Lady Melania Trump ranked for celebrity searches, check out the full report here.
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