An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is introducing improvements to search suggestions in Chrome, the company announced today. As part of the changes, users will start to get more helpful search suggestions in Chrome based on what others are searching for, see more images for suggested searches and find search suggestions even with a poor connection. Search suggestions are the drop-down list of suggested completions that appear before you finish typing out your query in Google. The feature generates predictions to help users save time and speed up their search. With these new updates, Google is expanding the availability of search suggestions and using them to boost inspiration. When users are signed into Chrome on desktop and open a new tab, they will now start to see suggestions in the search box related to their previous searches based on what other people are searching for.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google pulled more than a dozen popular Indian apps including recruitment platform Naukri, matrimony service Shaadi, audio storytelling platforms Kuku FM and Stage and real-estate manager 99acres from Play Store on Friday after warning that it will be taking actions against developers who have persistently not complied with its billing policies, escalating a three-year dispute in what is the company's largest market by users. Google said that 10 companies in the country, including "many well-established" names it did not disclose, had avoided paying fees despite benefiting from the platform. The Android-maker, owned by Alphabet, said a small group of developers in India had more than three years to prepare and comply with Play Store's payments policy but opted against it. These firms continue to comply with payment policies of other app stores, Google said. Some Android apps of matrimony platforms Shaadi, Matrimony.com and Bharat Matrimony were pulled from the Play Store Friday. Info Edge's Naukri and 99acres, audio storytelling apps Kuku FM and Stage, Alt Balaji's Altt, dating service Quack Quack were also axed from the store. Murugavel Janakiraman, chief executive of Bharat Matrimony, said Google had pulled about 10 of the Indian firm's apps from the store. Bharat Matrimony is evaluating legal options, he told TechCrunch, adding that he believes Google has violated an Indian antitrust watchdog's order in its removal of the apps today. It's a "dark day for the India internet," he added. Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder and chief executive of Kuku FM lambasted at Google, saying the Android-maker had turned "the most evil" partner to do business with and the Indian startup ecosystem was "completely" in its control.

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Google is cracking down on rooted Android devices, blocking multiple people from using the RCS message feature in Google Messages. From a report: Users with rooted phones -- a process that unlocks privileged access to the Android operating system, like jailbreaking iPhones -- have made several reports on the Google Messages support page, Reddit, and XDA's web forum over the last few months, finding they're suddenly unable to send or receive RCS messages. One example from Reddit user u/joefuf shows that RCS messages would simply vanish after hitting the send button. Several reports also mention that Google Messages gave no indication that RCS chat was no longer working, and was still showing as connected and working in Google Messages. In a statement sent to the Verge where we asked if Google is blocking rooted devices from using RCS, Google communications manager Ivy Hunt said the company is "ensuring that message-issuing/receiving devices are following the operating measures defined by the RCS standard" in a bid to prevent spam and abuse on Google Messages. In other words, yes, Google is blocking RCS on rooted devices.

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Google announced updates to its search ranking systems aimed at promoting high-quality content and demoting manipulative or low-effort material, including content generated by AI solely to summarize other sources. The company also stated it is improving its ability to detect and combat tactics used to deceive its ranking algorithms.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MobileSyrup: Google's new smart assistant, Gemini, is available on multiple devices but Gemini Nano, the multimodal large language model, isn't coming to all Pixel smartphones. Gemini Nano is only available on the Google Pixel 8 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S24 series; however, we've recently learned that it's not making its way to the base Pixel 8, according to Terence Zhang, an engineer at Google and reporter by Mishaal Rahman. Zhang told everyone that Gemini Nano isn't coming to the Pixel 8 because of hardware limitations, but it's unclear what the hardware limitations are. Many would assume it's due to the Pixel 8 housing only 8GB of RAM compared to the Pixel 8 Pro's 12GB. That said, the Galaxy S24 series starts at 8GB of RAM and can use Nano. This must mean that some other hardware limitations are holding back Gemini Nano. Hopefully, more information will come in the future, but right now, it seems like only high-end devices will get the Gemini Nano experience.

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Google is restricting AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions about the global elections set to happen this year, the Alphabet-owned firm said on Tuesday, as it looks to avoid potential missteps in the deployment of the technology. From a report: The update comes at a time when advancements in generative AI, including image and video generation, have fanned concerns of misinformation and fake news among the public, prompting governments to regulate the technology. When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search". Google had announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect ahead of the election. "In preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we are restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.

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Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT. [...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft. "SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.

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Google announced a major change to its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome today that will make the service work in real time by checking against a server-side list -- all without sharing your browsing habits with Google. From a report: Previously, Chrome downloaded a list of known sites that harbor malware, unwanted software and phishing scams once or twice per hour. Now, Chrome will move to a system that will send the URLs you are visiting to its servers and check against a rapidly updated list there. The advantage of this is that it doesn't take up to an hour to get an updated list because, as Google notes, the average malicious site doesn't exist for more than 10 minutes. The company claims that this new server-side system can catch up to 25 percent more phishing attacks than using local lists. These local lists have also grown in size, putting more of a strain on low-end machines and low-bandwidth connections. Google is rolling out this new system to desktop and iOS users now, with Android support coming later this month.

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Apple is in talks to build Google's Gemini AI engine into the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry. From the report: The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google's set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.

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