Tips, tricks, and thoughts about Google, AdWords, Google Cloud Platform, and all its subsidiaries. Not affiliated with or sponsored by Google.
During today’s Notre Dame fire, Google updated the search results for Notre Dame to indicate the emergency. Here is what Google Maps showed (note the little fire icon above the cathedral):
If you Google searched for the fire, or clicked the link from Maps, you’ll see the following screenshot. Note the emergency alert at the top, and the map of the fire’s affected area underneath the news section.
Google recently posted the below Twitter thread, introducing the before: and after: search operators. Now instead of using advanced search to limit searches by date, you can use these operators straight in the search box.
For example, if I need to search for Star Wars content before 2018, I can try:
star wars before:2018
Compare that to a regular search for Star Wars content, which includes news released in this year – 2019.
star wars
I use PhantomJSCloud to take screenshots of web apps. While writing new code, I noticed this error coming back from the server:
{
"name":"HttpStatusCodeException",
"statusCode":400,
"message":"Error extracting userRequest. innerException: JSON5: invalid character 'u' at 1:1",
"stack":[
"no stack unless env is DEV or TEST, or logLevel is DEBUG or TRACE"
]
}The problem came because the request wasn’t JSON-encoding the object; the fix looks like this (using the requests library):
post_data_string = json.dumps(python_object_here, sort_keys=True, indent=3, separators=(',', ': '))
r = requests.post('https://phantomjscloud.com/api/browser/v2/', data=post_data_string)Search Engine Land announces they’ve spotted a new version of GoogleBot in the wild – it’s based on a more recent version of Chrome and can therefore render (and index for search) more advanced web applications:
https://searchengineland.com/google-spotted-testing-version-of-googlebot-that-can-render-more-content-315322 . A Googler even confirms the story through Twitter.
While we know that the GoogleBot is constantly improving, it’s good to see that Google is investing more time into GoogleBot being able to see modern web applications.
Here is a simple cloudbuild.yaml file, used to deploy a Python application from GitHub to App Engine.
steps:
- name: "gcr.io/cloud-builders/gcloud"
args: ["app", "deploy"]
timeout: "1600s"Today, the Google doodle celebrates the first image taken of a black hole. Here is the doodle image:
Here’s the Google main page with the doodle:
Clicking on the logo links you to a search for First Image of a Black Hole:
I was reading through the latest news and I stumbled upon this interesting article from Inc: Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things.
The article’s recommendations seem to be very similar to what makes a good local team: let the team get to know each other, set boundaries, and connect on a personal level.
Microsoft has released the first build of its Chromium-based Edge browser – in other words, an Edge browser that uses Chromium (the open-source base for Google Chrome) to render web pages.
The link goes to:
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us .
I’ve been playing around with it, and it’s surprisingly fast. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.
For those of you who need a little help with Google Maps, Google offers a screen with all the keyboard shortcuts available in Maps. Just open up Maps, click anywhere in the map area, then hold down the [Shift] and [?] keys – you’ll get the screen below:
Gmail has been celebrating its 15th birthday by changing the login screen and its usual icon. Here is the new login screen:
And here is the new Gmail icon used in the upper left hand corner of the web app:
