2021

We all need a bit of escapism sometimes, and there’s nothing like a blast from the pop-culture past to do the trick. Today, we’re bringing characters from classic Japanese anime, games and TV shows to life — from Pac-Man to Hello Kitty — with augmented reality (AR) in Search. 

Japan’s anime and video game culture emerged between the 1950s and the 1980s, as comic books, gaming arcades and home TVs and consoles boomed. But it wasn’t just a Japanese phenomenon. The most iconic characters caught people’s imaginations around the world, and they’re still hugely popular today. 

Which animated icon is most searched on Google? Pac-Man leads the pack by a long way: worldwide search interest in the hungry dot-gobbler is more than double the next most-searched character, Hello Kitty. What might surprise you is that the top country for search interest in Pac-Man over the past five years was…Peru. Hello Kitty is most searched in the Philippines. 

When it comes to the broader trends, anime wins out. It’s more popular than video games worldwide, with interest for anime climbing to its highest peak on record in the past month. That’s pretty amazing — and in fact, search interest for “anime sugoi” (or “anime is amazing”) has spiked 2,300% in the past five years globally.

What can Jellyfish teach us about climate change, what happens to disposed plastic and what species will be lost as temperatures rise? As these questions mount, artists are helping us to see and understand what the data makes clear.

A year ago, and in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture we (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC) launched “Heartbeat of the Earth” – four  interactive and educational experiments by artists exploring scientific climate data. 

 Today, as we approach Earth Day, we’re sharing a new set of climate experiments created by artists Giorgia Lupi, Felicity Hammond, Cristina Tarquini and Sey Min. They invite you to learn about the challenges our climate faces through creative data visualisations and interactive scenarios that help us learn more about these topics.

Sure, spring is nice, and there’s so much to celebrate in the winter but my favorite season is easily awards season! 2021 marks 93 years of Hollywood’s annual film celebration, and this year’s Academy Awards will be a combination of in-person and virtual.

Ahead of the big night every year, my friends and I try to watch all of the new nominees, along with some of our favorite past winners. With the help of Google Search, we’re able to keep track of everything we want to watch, as well as check titles off once the credits roll. Starting today, you’ll find a brand new carousel of 2021 nominated movies when searching for “what to watch.” And on Google TV, we’re featuring collections that highlight nominees and 20 years of award-winning women.

Access to information is at the core of Google’s mission, and every day we work to make information from the web available to everyone. We design our systems to return the most relevant and reliable information possible, but our search results include pages from the open web. Depending on what you search for, the results can include content that people might find objectionable or offensive.

While we’re committed to providing open access to information, we also have a strong commitment and responsibility to comply with the law and protect our users. When content is against local law, we remove it from being accessible in Google Search. 

Overall, our approach to information quality and webpage removals aims to strike a balance between ensuring that people have access to the information they need, while also doing our best to protect against harmful information online. Here’s an overview of how we do that.

Complying with the law

We hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to our legal requirements to remove pages from Google search results. For many issues, such as privacy or defamation, our legal obligations may vary country by country, as different jurisdictions have come to different conclusions about how to deal with these complex topics.

We encourage people and authorities to alert us to content they believe violates the law. In fact, in most cases, this is necessary, because determining whether content is illegal is not always a determination that Google is equipped to make, especially without notice from those who are affected. 

For example, in the case of copyrighted material, we can’t automatically confirm whether a given page hosting that particular content has a license to do so, so we need rightsholders to tell us. By contrast, the mere presence of child sex abuse material (CSAM) on a page is illegal in most jurisdictions, so we develop ways to automatically identify that content and prevent it from showing in our results.

In the case of all legal removals, we share information about government requests for removal in our Transparency Report. Where possible, we inform website owners about requests for removal via Search Console.

Voluntary removal policies

Beyond removing content as required by law, we also have a set of policies that go beyond what’s legally required, mostly focused on highly personal content appearing on the open web. Examples of this content include financial or medical information, government-issued IDs, and intimate imagery published without consent.

These types of content are information that people generally intend to keep private and can cause serious harm, like identity theft, so we give people the ability to request removal from our search results.

We also look for new ways to carefully expand these policies to allow further protections for people online. For example, we allow people to request the removal of pages about themselves on sites with exploitative removals policies, as well as pages that include contact information alongside personal threats, a form of “doxxing.” In these cases, while people may want to access these sites to find potentially useful information or understand their policies and practices, the pages themselves provide little value or public interest, and might lead to reputational or even physical harm that we aim to help protect against.

Solving issues at scale

It might seem intuitive to solve content problems by removing more content — either page by page, or by limiting access to entire sites. However, in addition to being in tension with our mission, this approach also doesn’t effectively scale to the size of the open web, with trillions of pages and more being added each minute. Building scalable, automated approaches allows us to not only solve these challenges more effectively, but also avoid unnecessarily limiting access to legal content online.

Our most effective protection is to design systems that rank high-quality, reliable information at the top of our results. And while we do remove pages in compliance with our policies and legal obligations, we also use insights from those removals to improve our systems overall.

For example, when we receive a high volume of valid copyright removal requests from a given site, we are able to use that as a quality signal and demote the site in our results. We’ve developed similar approaches for sites whose pages we’ve removed under our voluntary policies. This allows us to not only help the people requesting the removals, but also scalably fight against the issue in other cases.

An evolving web

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that even when we remove content from Google Search, it may still exist on the web, and only a website owner can remove content entirely. But we do fight against the harmful effects of sensitive personal information appearing in our results, and have strict practices to ensure we’re complying with the law. We’re always evolving our approach to protect against bad actors on the web and ensure Google continues to deliver high-quality, reliable information for everyone. 

Beyond how we handle removals of we pages, if you’d like to learn more about how we approach our policies for search features, visit this post. And if you’re still looking for more details about Search, check out more past articles in our How Search Works series.

Today, Fitbit is introducing Fitbit Luxe, a fitness and wellness tracker designed to help you take a more holistic approach to your health and wellness, all while staying fashion-forward. Luxe offers the motivation and support to help take control of your health with everything from your Stress Management Score to sleep tracking to Active Zone Minutes and more, all in an elegant bracelet so you can focus on your goals without sacrificing your look.

With gentle curves that create one of our most comfortable devices yet, Luxe was designed to work with a diverse range of wrist sizes and lifestyles for 24/7 wear. Fitbit Luxe is available for pre-order today starting at $149.95. Here’s what’s in store: 

A style that moves with you

The first thing you’ll notice about Luxe is that it’s simply beautiful. Using an advanced design process called metal injection molding, we transformed stainless steel into a soft, gentle shape that lightly sits on your wrist with a single-surface feel that’s key for 24/7 wearability. It’s available in three colors: graphite, platinum and soft gold, with a comfortable silicone band with a quick-release band attach. This will allow you to quickly change up your look with a variety of accessory bands that come in different materials and colors. Plus, the high-polish mirror finish on the platinum and soft gold band colors gives Luxe that truly premium look and feel.

Luxe is also the first Fitbit tracker with a vibrant, easy-to-view color touchscreen (AMOLED) that brings your stats to life with a range of colorful clock face designs. The screen brightness automatically adjusts with an ambient light sensor, going from two times brighter than our other trackers in daylight to a dimness that is easier on your eyes at night.

Gopi Shah began working with clay at age 14, and has now spent nearly 20 years making ceramic cups, dinnerware, sculptures and decorations. From her one-woman studio in Long Beach, California, she crafts designs inspired by Mesoamerican and Andean art, textiles and prints, and her natural surroundings. Recently, the Google Web Creators team teamed up with Gopi to create a Web Story, A Guide to Shaping Clay, about her work. 

 The story takes you behind the scenes in Gopi’s studio. Instead of just seeing the finished product as you would on Gopi’s website, you explore the whole pottery-making process — starting with the tools of the trade.