Category Archives: Google

Google today announced a new version of Workspace, the companys productivity service that you probably still refer to as G Suite. With the new and free Google Workspace Essentials plan, Google wants to bring more business users onto the platform by offering them the basic Workspace productivity tools with the exception of Gmail.

Until now, in order to use Workspace with a non-Google email address, you had to sign up for the $6/month/user Business Starter account after a 14-day trial. That paid plan is not going away, but all you now need to do is sign up with your work email and youre good to go. No credit card needed.

The new free plan is essentially the existing entry-level Business Starter plan, but with a reduced storage quota of 15 GB (down from 30). Otherwise, though, you can use Google Meet with up to 100 users for up to 60 minutes in each call, get access to Spaces for work collaboration and Chat for gossiping about their co-workers.All of the standard tools like Sheets, Slides and Docs are also included, of course.

Since you already have an email address from work, though, theres no Gmail included in this edition, which makes sense, given that it would be tough to send out emails with your work address from there, leading to all kinds of confusion.

Image Credits: Google

There is a little complication here, though. There is a cap of 25 users per Essentials Starter team account. But multiple team accounts can be created within the same company. So basically, somebody from your team needs to start an account and can then invite other team members if youre working in a larger company.

With this move, Google is opening up a whole new world for shadow IT and Google says as much in its announcement when it writes: With Essentials Starter, were making it easy for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to work. If IT doesnt make the choice, employees will make it for them.

This also opens up all kinds of questions about data governance and security.

Google Workspace Essentials Starter was designed for people to easily start using Google Workspace at work by themselves or with their team, a Google spokesperson told me when I asked about this. While it does include some lightweight admin controlssuch as the ability to invite users to their team granular IT controls and features like more advanced security are only available with paid Google Workspace plans.

Chances are, this will get any large enterprise that doesnt have a paid Workspace account yet to quickly sign up for one in order to block its employees from setting up their own.

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Google Workspace goes all in on shadow IT - TechCrunch

Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.

REUTERS

While Facebook is in the midst of its biggest stock drop ever and is trading at an 18-month low, Google remains near a record and has easily outperformed all of its Big Tech peers over the past year.

The difference is Apple.

Google and Facebook are the two dominant online ad companies in the U.S. and have been for years. While the companies do very different things and have faced their own unique issues, the five-year stock charts look pretty similar.

Until you hit late 2021.

Facebook vs. Google since beginning of 2017

That's when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's longtime struggle to control his own destiny started hitting his company's financials.

Facebook's apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.

Google also relies on ad targeting to connect marketers with users on many of its properties, but search advertising is a unique asset users tend to "self-target" as they're typing in a search query that explains exactly what they're interested in at that moment.

When it comes to targeting, Google has Android, the world's most popular operating system, giving it control over its own policies. And while Google still needs iOS distribution, it has a cozier relationship with Apple. Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine on Apple's Safari browser.

Add it all up, and Facebook just told Wall Street that Apple's new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature is expected to cost the social media company $10 billion in revenue this year. That's a big reason why Facebook fell well short of its revenue forecast for the first quarter and why the stock plummeted 25% on Thursday, its biggest ever drop, to the its lowest since August 2020.

Google, meanwhile, reported blowout fourth-quarter results earlier this week on the back of a 33% jump in ad revenue, compared to 20% for Facebook. Analysts expect Google parent Alphabet to hit growth of 23% in the first quarter, while Facebook is projecting expansion of just 3% to 11%.

Dave Wehner, the CFO of Facebook parent Meta, said on Wednesday's conference call with analysts that, when it comes to Apple treating search more favorably than other apps because of the Google deal, "the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue."

Analysts see the correlation. Advertisers that can no longer get the level of targeting they want on Facebook are spending more on Google.

"Did Apple iOS changes trigger a market share shift from Facebook to Google?" MKM Partners' Rohit Kulkarni wrote in a report on Thursday. "Yes, we believe so." MKM has a buy rating on both tocks.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's operating chief and a former senior executive at Google, said Apple's changes are most harmful to small and medium-sized businesses, which are most reliant on personalization and targeting in their advertising.

"So we're definitely seeing that this has more of an impact forSMBs," she said.

Zuckerberg has been worried about this possibility for a long time. Without owning the device or operating system, Facebook can't fully chart its own path, and is always subject to the whims of other companies. About a decade ago, Facebook designed its own phone, but it was a disaster.

Here's what Facebook said in the risk factors of its IPO prospectus in 2012, which was still the early days of mobile for the company.

"We are dependent on the interoperability of Facebook with popular mobile operating systems that we do not control, such as Android and iOS, and any changes in such systems that degrade our products' functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products could adversely affect Facebook usage on mobile devices."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen fencing in the "Metaverse" with an Olympic gold medal fencer during a live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference to announce the rebrand of Facebook as Meta, in this screen grab taken from a video released October 28, 2021.

Facebook | via Reuters

In 2014, Facebook acquired a nascent virtual reality headset company called Oculus for $2 billion, giving the company a shot at making the next generation of hardware and integrating its own software.

That acquisition is the foundation for the future that Zuckerberg so much desires. Late last year, he changed Facebook's name to Meta Platforms. In Thursday's earnings report, the company said its Reality Labs group, home to the virtual reality development, lost more than $10 billion in 2021.

Investors are rightly worried. Facebook's core business is losing users, and Apple is flexing in a way that's causing panic.

For Zuckerberg, the answer to his real world problems may be the virtual world. As much as anything, he wants to break free of Apple and Google, so his company gets to be the one making the rules.

CNBC's Kif Leswing and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

WATCH: I'm not a buyer on Facebook

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Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple - CNBC

Google has announced that Gmails new layout, which changes how Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces are integrated, will be available to try starting in February; become default by April; and become the only option by the end of Q2 2022. The view makes it so Googles other messaging tools, which are part of (but not necessarily limited to) its business-focused Workspace suite, are no longer just little windows floating alongside your emails, but get their own screens in Gmail that are accessible with large buttons on the left-hand side.

Google calls this the integrated view, and itll soon be familiar if you (or your employer) are a Workspace customer, or if you use Chat and Meet personally. Starting February 8th, Google says youll be able to start testing the layout for yourself. By April, anyone who hasnt opted in (Google shows that therell be a prompt at some point, encouraging you to do so), will be switched over to the new layout, but will be able to switch back in settings. That option will go away by the end of the second quarter, according to Google, when the new layout becomes the standard experience for Gmail.

The new view could be polarizing while managing chats and meetings can be a bit confusing in the current Gmail layout, it all happens on one screen, which is pleasing if you love data density. But for those looking to focus on one thing at a time, the new interface looks like itll give you easy access to other tools without having them always on the screen. There will, however, be ways to access your Chats from the email screen a Google support page describing the new layout mentions that new notifications will show up as a bubble in the left corner of the screen, and that youll be able to create a mini pop-up window within the interface that you can use to reply.

The company says that there will also be notification bubbles to let you know if other tools need your attention, which could be less distracting than, say, having a list of all your Chats living to the left or right of your emails.

Google has shown that it wants to deeply integrate all its work-related products together, and this layout gives us a taste of what that could look like, with tools like Spaces letting you jump into a spreadsheet without leaving Gmail. While it does seem like youre mostly already able to, as Google puts it when describing the new view, easily switch between your inbox, important conversations, and join meetings without having to switch between tabs or open a new window, its probably fair to argue that it all feels a little tacked-on. Googles screenshots of the new layout do make it seem like the new interface will be more put-together.

The services will also be more integrated Gmails search, for instance, will also turn up Chat messages in the coming months, according to the company (similar to how Hangouts messages also used to be searchable from within Gmail).

Google says that this new layout will be coming to anyone who uses Google Chat. According to Google spokesperson Amanda Lam, the focus of the new integrated view is for users who use multiple apps. By the end of the year, this means users would get this experience if they opt-in to Google Chat or Google Meet.

Update February 3rd, 2:55PM ET: Updated with information that Google has now decided that the layout will be available to anyone who uses Chat and Meet, instead of limiting it to a specific type of customer as was originally announced.

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Gmails new integrated layout will take over inboxes soon - The Verge

Two members of Googles Ethical AI group have announced their departures from the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. Senior researcher Alex Hanna, and software engineer Dylan Baker, will join Timnit Gebrus nonprofit research institute, Distributed AI Research (DAIR).

In a post announcing her resignation on Medium, Hanna criticizes the toxic work environment at Google, and draws attention to a lack of representation of Black women at the company.

Prior to Timnits hiring, Google Research management had never recruited a Black woman as a research scientist, Hanna states. In one town hall around Googlegeist (Googles annual workplace climate survey), a high-level executive remarked that there had been such low numbers of Black women in the Google Research organization that they couldnt even present a point estimate of these employees dissatisfaction with the organization, lest management risk deanonymizing the results.

Gebru, the former co-lead of Googles AI Ethical research group, was fired by the company in 2020 after co-authoring a research paper that called attention to the potential risks of large-scale language models, a concept similar to the one Google Search employs. The search giant fired another AI ethics researcher, Margaret Mitchell, for her involvement in Gebrus paper shortly thereafter.

While the companys diversity report from last year showed an overall increase in the number of Black employees it hired, there was still an increase in the number of women of color that left the company at the time of the reports release, Black women made up 1.8 percent of Googles workforce. And in December, Californias Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) launched an investigation over Googles treatment of Black female workers.

We appreciate Alex and Dylans contributions our research on responsible AI is incredibly important, and were continuing to expand our work in this area in keeping with our AI Principles, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said in a statement emailed to The Verge. Were also committed to building a company where people of different views, backgrounds and experiences can do their best work and show up for one another.

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Two members of Google's Ethical AI group leave to join Timnit Gebru's nonprofit - The Verge

Did you know that Google Maps has a nifty little trick that lets you adjust zoom with just one finger? Because I sure as hell didnt until yesterday, when a tweet from Sketchfab CEO Alban Denoyel alerted me to its existence via a years-old YouTube video from 2013. The shortcut is simple: just double-tap the maps interface, but instead of lifting your finger after the second tap (the shortcut for zooming in), you leave it touching the screen. Then a swipe up zooms out, and a swipe down zooms in. Neat right?

With this knowledge you can say goodbye to awkwardly holding the phone and trying to use two fingers to reposition the map to check your directions when your other hand is busy holding a dog leash, coffee cup, shopping bag, or whatever. Personally Im looking forward to using it the next time Im on a bike and need to whip out my phone to quickly check directions. No more taking both hands off the handlebars for this guy. No sir.

I havent done an exhaustive search, but it looks like this feature is pretty commonplace across mapping apps. It works on Google Maps on both Android and iOS, and also works in other iOS mapping apps like Apple Maps and CityMapper. Have fun!

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Today I learned a handy trick to zoom in and out of Google Maps - The Verge

Google explains how it keeps user-created reviews on Google Maps free of fraud and abuse in a new blog post and accompanying video. Like many platforms dealing with moderation at scale, Google says it uses a mix of automated machine learning systems as well as human operators.

The details come amidst growing scrutiny of user reviews on sites like Google Maps and Yelp, where businesses have been hit with bad reviews for implementing COVID-related health and safety measures (including mask and vaccine requirements) often beyond their control. Other reviews have criticized businesses for supposedly leading them to contract COVID-19 or for not keeping to usual business hours during a global pandemic.

Earlier today, Yelp reported that it removed over 15,500 reviews between April and December last year for violating its COVID-19 content guidelines, a 161 percent increase over the same period in 2020. In total, Yelp says it removed over 70,200 reviews across nearly 1,300 pages in 2021, with many resulting from so-called review bombing incidents where coordinated reviews are submitted from users who havent actually patronized a business.

Google explains that every review posted on Google Maps is checked by its machine learning system, which has been trained on the companys content policies to weed out abusive or misleading reviews. This system is trained to check both the contents of individual reviews, but itll also look for wider patterns like sudden spikes in one- or five-star reviews both from the account itself, as well as other reviews on the business.

Google says that human moderation comes into play for content thats been flagged by end users and businesses themselves. Offending reviews can be removed, and in more severe cases, user accounts can be suspended and litigation pursued. Weve found that we need both the nuanced understanding that humans offer and the scale that machines provide to help us moderate contributed content, Googles product lead for user-generated content, Ian Leader, writes.

Its an interesting look at the steps Google takes to keep Maps reviews usable. You can read more in the full blog post.

Excerpt from:

Google Maps review moderation detailed as Yelp reports thousands of violations - The Verge

Cookies are one of the many questionable pacts we have made online, where privacy is exchanged for convenience without being entirely sure about the consequences. As with so many arrangements involving our data, this deal is being rewritten under the gaze of regulators.

Last week Google issued an update on how it is replacing cookies on its Chrome browser, which is important because two-thirds of web browsing around the world is on Chrome.

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Put simply, a cookie is a text file that is dropped into your browser by a website when you visit it. In the UK and EU, you are asked to consent to multiple cookies when you click on a site (and yes its worth checking just how many cookies you agree to take on when you give your consent).

The new head of the UKs data watchdog, John Edwards, told BBC Radio 4s Today programme last week on international data privacy day that he is no fan of the consent-clicking process. Thats not a very effective way of rebalancing the power relationship between consumers and companies that profit from consumers data, he said.

Cookie monsters

Cookies identify individual users so the website can record all kinds of things about your activity. Some of this info is helpful, like whether you have logged in to the site before, so you dont have to constantly enter your user name and password every time you visit in the future. This sort of thing is known as a first party cookie.

However, there are types of this technology known as third party cookies that facilitate the storing of information (like your browsing history and your location) by commercial partners often marketing or advertising businesses that might make you slightly more uncomfortable. If you check the cookie consent box on any website, you will be surprised at the number of advertising and marketing-related cookies. Third party cookies, through agreements with multiple publishers and websites, are able to create a profile of individual users and serve targeted adverts to you while you browse across multiple websites. Like other news publishers, the Guardian asks readers if it can use cookies, for purposes such as measuring how often readers visit and use our site, and showing readers personalised ads.

In what appears to be a win for privacy advocates and a blow to publishers, advertisers and the intermediaries that facilitate personalised ads across the web, third party cookies are being phased out across the board. This is in part due to pressure from regulators and pro-privacy laws like GDPR. Apple and Mozilla have blocked third party cookies on their Safari and Firefox browsers and Google is doing the same on Chrome by 2023.

Leaving the FLoC behind

Google is replacing third party cookies with a set of technologies called a privacy sandbox and last week it announced it was changing one of the key proposals. The initial plan was to bundle people into groups (cohorts) with similar interests based on their browsing habits and allow advertisers to serve ads to those groups. This was called FLoC, for Federated Learning of Cohorts.

After feedback from the industry, which included warnings that individuals could still be identified as they browsed across the web under the FLoC system, Google is now proposing a different system. It is called Topics, in which the Chrome browser notes your top interests for that week based on your browsing history and registers them in the browser (like a cookie would) under broad categories like fitness or travel, which are limited in number. Advertisers and publishers are able to access this data via a browser API, which is a feed of information that they can tap into.

Then when users visit a site that has signed up to the system, three of the users topics of interest are shared with the site and its advertisers, allowing the site to serve ads that reflect the users interest in, for instance, rock music or cars.

Google said the topics will not include sensitive categories such as gender or race and the system will allow users to see the topics, remove any they dont like or disable the feature completely. The topics are deleted every three weeks.

In the UK the Competition and Markets Authority and the Information Commissioners Office are looking at the proposals, from a competition and privacy perspective (ie are there disadvantages for Googles rivals in provision of online adverts and will users data be abused). Rivals are also concerned that Google, which has said other parts of its business like YouTube will adhere to these changes, still has a basic advantage through the sheer amount of existing data it has on users. Vinay Goel, the Google product director in charge of the sandbox project, says: We have developed these new proposals in the open, seeking feedback at every step to ensure that they work for everyone, without preferential treatment or advantage to Googles advertising products or to Googles own sites.

According to the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for peoples digital rights, Googles new proposals signal an end to the data gold rush under third party cookies. Conducting behavioural profiling in the browser could constitute an alternative to the existing data-free-for-all model, where your browsing activities are broadcasted to thousands of unknown intermediaries, says Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at ORG.

However, the ORG remains concerned over several issues including the lack of a default opt-in stance, which would see a browser omitted from the scheme unless they chose to be included. This is still behavioural profiling, says the ORG.

Goel adds: We started the Privacy Sandbox initiative to improve web privacy for users, and Topics will allow for users to have greater control over relevant ads without sharing sensitive details such as gender or race.

Nobodys happy so everybody wins

It is a big change for the digital advertising industry. Farhad Divecha, managing director of UK digital marketing agency Accuracast, wonders if the shift will satisfy anyone. Privacy advocates are going to feel that this is still not quite enough, because theres reasons why this is still tracking behaviour. And on the flip side, advertisers are going to say youre taking away stuff from me. And youre taking away my ability to target specifically whom I want to be reaching.

Paul Banister, chief strategy officer at US digital ad management firm Cafe Media, says the momentum nonetheless is with privacy. I think the pendulum has swung pretty far towards privacy here. But he adds: because its easier to understand the topics system, hopefully it will be more something that users feel good about. And if users are happier with the outcome that is better for advertisers, because it makes people more supportive of what their data is being used for.

This could be just the beginning as internet users become more aware of that trade off between privacy and convenience, and regulators continue to challenge the marketing industry upon which much of big tech profits rely, the pendulum could swing further.

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TechScape: Google is changing how it tracks us online but who benefits? - The Guardian

It took more than a year of painstaking, detailed work for Access Allegany the public transportation system in Allegany County to go live onGoogle Maps.

When the project finally reached its goal on Jan. 6, Access Allegany mobility manager Gwen Cooper said she was thrilled to pieces to see it come to life and to see how well it works.

With Google Maps, Access Allegany riders have easy-to-understand trip information, including trip times, bus numbers, pick-up and stop locations and transfers, Cooper said.

It was a project involving Ardent Solutions, mobility managers for Allegany Countys mass transit system; 511NY, the free telephone and web transit service which created the General Transit Feed Specification files for the system and Google Transit, which plugged those data files into Google Maps.

Cooper explained why she believes this is such an important step forward for Access Allegany.

Transportation is always in the top three of issues for our community members and we are always looking to increase ridership, she said.

Key to that effort, according to Cooper, is making the service easier to use.

I dont know if youve ever tried to read a bus schedule, but it can be extremely overwhelming at times, she said. Even those of us who work for Access Allegany who read our bus schedules quite regularly, its sometimes hard for even us to figure out, so the average consumer might not have any idea how to read it.

Some of our routes, depending on where you start and where you want to end up, you might have to transfer to another bus, maybe even two other buses, and it tells you exactly all of that information," Cooper said. "You dont have to think about it. You dont have to figure it out.

Google Maps is also a program familiar to many people. According to Google, more than a billion people use Google Maps every month and more than 5 million active apps and websites are using Google Maps Platform core products every week.

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To get started, open Google Maps and click the Directions arrow. This will provide several travel options at the top of the screen, including flight, cycling, walking, driving and transit, which is represented by a bus icon.

So if youre searching for a public transportation route in Allegany County, you pick that bus icon, Cooper said.

Then type in where you want to start your trip and the trip's destination. Hit search, and all routes meeting that need willbe shown. From there, select the route that works best for you.

To see the stops in a route and other information, click on Details. It calculates the distance to a bus stop as well as the time the bus will arrive and drop you off. Clicking on the "Details" will also let you know the service area of the bus and the bus number.

Additional Travel Information and Options" include a Leave Now tab, which allows the user to select the timing of the trip.

Additional features include the capability to send trip directions to a Google account and to see a breakdown of all the times available for a trip, which means riders can plan transportation hours or days ahead of time.

Allegany County owns Access Allegany, supplying funding for the fixed-route public transit system that runs five buses in six service areas, Monday throughFriday.

Allegany County contracts with First Transit to operate the system, while Ardent Solutions has the contract to provide the management.

Cooper, who works for Ardent Solutions, said it was a 14-month process involving a great deal of trial and error to meet Google Transits exacting requirements.

They are super meticulous, she explained. Obviously, they hold the market on any sort of mapping software thats out there. Theyre very responsive. They followed up. They were understanding if it was going to take some time to update the GTFS file."

Close enough was not adequate when it came to providing Google Transit with route locations and stop placements.

Cooper said, We had a couple issues with route locations, and theyre very specific about where the stop is placed.

For example, if theyre pulling up outside the Episcopal church in Wellsville which is a stop thats utilized quite often for our riders, within the files that stop has to be on the sidewalk or the side of the road.

When you get into some of these software programs, you think you are at the right spot, but Google Maps would pull it up and it would show the middle of the road, so theyre very meticulous because theyre like, Nobodys going to catch a bus in the middle of the road.

Access Allegany is just beginning to get the word out about its availability on Google Maps. Marketing materials are coming together and a big Facebook push is planned. Customer training sessions are also in the works.

Many riders continue to contact the call center at 585-593-1738 and call center staff now have Google Maps at their disposal to help riders plan trips.

Cooper acknowledged that COVID-19 has decreased business, but she said Access Alleganys ridership numbers are consistent with national averages for mass transit systems. She said Access Allegany tracks ridership numbers daily and the focus is always on improvement.

Ultimately our goal is to increase our ridership and make this an accessible option for anybody in our community that needs transportation, Cooper said.

Follow Neal Simon on Twitter @HornellTribNeal.To get unlimited access to the latest news, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

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County mass transit system on Google Maps: Why Allegany Access is excited - Hornell Evening Tribune

While we all rely on Google or other internet search engines to find and absorb information quickly these days, a recent decision in the Central District of Illinois highlights the problems for expert witnesses relying on internet research as a methodology. See Sherman v. BNSF Railway Co., Case No. 1:17-cv-01192, 2022 WL 138630 (C.D. Ill. Jan. 14, 2022). While Googling is likely a practice that many experts may engage in (though may be loathe to admit it), Google searching alone is a suspect methodology upon which to base expert opinions.

In Sherman, Plaintiff sued Defendant BNSF Railway Co. (BNSF) pursuant to the Federal Employers Liability Act, alleging that during her employment with BNSF, she was exposed to toxic substances and carcinogens, including asbestos, that caused her to develop rectal cancer.

BNSF moved to exclude Plaintiffs medical causation expert. In relevant part, BNSF attacked the experts methodology in arriving at his general causation conclusion that asbestos could cause rectal cancer. During his deposition, the expert testified that in reaching his opinions on certain chemicals and rectal cancer, his general approach is to do a Google search, and thats what I did in this case as well..

BNSF argued that the experts methodology was unreliable, in that he did not retain a list of what he viewed and what information he considered, he has no record of when the Google search was performed, what search terms he used, which sites he looked at, which articles he looked at, and what information he considered and discarded or why.

The Sherman court agreed, noting that the experts methodology his Google search seriously lacks indicia of reliability. In fact, the court noted that the experts methodology is so lacking that it would be nearly useless to apply the non-exhaustive Daubert factors to it in order to determine its reliability. In excluding the experts testimony, the court reasoned that it was entirely precluded from finding [the experts] methodology was reliable where he did not keep any record whatsoever of the particulars of his Google search, including the simple fact of the date(s) on which he performed his Google searches. Significantly, it would be essentially impossible for defense counsel to effectively cross-examine [the expert] at trial without knowing the particulars of [his] Google searches, specifically any information he reviewed and rejected and the reasons for doing so.

Plaintiff tried to resuscitate her expert, noting that his opinions were reliable because he drew from his extensive knowledge, training, and experience as a medical oncologist, he undertook a review of the available literature, considering both positive and negative evidence, and he reviewed publications of authoritative bodies. The court rejected this, noting that [t]he fact that [the expert] purportedly applied his knowledge, training, and experience to the existing data he reviewed does not eliminate the shortcoming that the full extent of that data is not known.

Sherman is obviously not the first case to exclude an expert for failure to conduct a reliable literature review. See e.g., In re Lipitor (Atorvastatin Calcium Marketing, Sales Pracs. and Prods. Liab. Litig., 174 F. Supp. 3d 911, 935 (D.S.C. 2016) (finding that it was not a valid methodology where expert had no explanation for how she identified [medical literature] for her consideration and that she could not simply pick the articles that she happened to remember or that supported her views, discuss them with a little commentary, and state an opinion). Nor is it even the first case to find that conducting Google searches does not an expert make. See e.g. Price v. LOreal USA, Inc., 2020 WL 4937464, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 24, 2020) (where expert opinion that ingredient in hair products was well known to consumers was based on certain Google searches among other document review, and where expert didnt list every article that [he] saw during those searches, his methodology was unreliable because [w]ithout a record of the materials reviewed, [the experts] methodology cannot be tested, challenged or replicated); Wai Feng Trading Co. Ltd., v. Quick Fitting, Inc., 2018 WL 6726557, at *10 (D.R.I. Dec. 21, 2018) (holding that expert methodology was rooted in guesswork and unhelpful under Rule 702 where expert noted that his methodology was based in part on online searching and Google, although he was unable to say what this research revealed); see also Toffoloni v. LFP Pub. Group, LLC, 2010 WL 4877911, at *2 (N.D. Ga. Nov. 23, 2010) (excluding damages experts opinion as unreliable in case where plaintiff sought damages for publication of unauthorized photographs; plaintiffs expert calculated the value of the photographs based on researching the value of the publication of another public figures photographs, and concluded plaintiffs images were worth more because [she] was a bigger celebrity based . . . on Google search results).

However, Sherman is a good reminder of the necessity to be ready to support your experts literature search, and also to challenge the search methodology of any opposing expert. A reliable literature review uses formal search methods to allow a researcher to obtain a neutral snapshot of the existing research on a particular question. In re Lipitor, 174 F. Supp. 3d at 929. In addition to relying on formal search methods beyond Google (e.g. searches of academic and/or scientific databases), an expert should document his or her literature searches and materials reviewed. Likewise, an expert should be prepared to describe the method of his or her searches at deposition, including how certain material was chosen to rely on and how certain material was distinguished by the expert. While your expert still may want to utilize Google in part, relying solely on Google searches and failing to document them could lead to the opinions based on those searches or the experts entire testimony to be excluded. The Sherman opinion does not say whether the excluded expert used Googles Im Feeling Lucky button for his searches, but his luck ran out when he was required to show his work.

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Let Me Google That for You: A Recent Central District of Illinois Opinion Highlights the Limits of Googling by Expert Witnesses Under Rule 702 and...

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Survivors of intimate partner violence searching for help may now have easier access to the National Domestic Violence Hotline thanks to a new feature launched by Google.

Starting Tuesday, when people in the US search Google for information related to domestic violence, "they will see a box at the top of the search results displaying the contact information for the (National Domestic Violence) Hotline with direct access to our phone and chat services," Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer for the hotline, wrote in a Googleblog post. "This will help survivors, especially those in crisis, get the information and connection to the 24/7 support they need quickly and with less scrolling."

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According to data provided by the hotline, domestic violence affects more than 12 million people in the US every year. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is the only national 24-hour domestic violence hotline providing compassionate support, life-saving resources and personalized safety planning via phone, online chat and text, according to the post.

A box displaying the National Domestic Violence Hotline information on Google.

The hotline's mission is "to answer the call to support and shift power back to those affected by relationship abuse 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," according to the post. Questions and advice that the hotline's advocates can help survivors with include managing search and browsing history; using computers found at the local library, internet cafe or shelter; and setting up an alternate email account that a partner doesn't know about.

This isn't the first time Google has partnered with a national association to help other at-risk communities get quick access to help and resources. "Help is available. Speak with someone today," reads, for example, a similar box displaying the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline contact information at the top of Google search results when users search for related information.

Google said it also surfaces resources for other crisis situations, including sexual assault and drug addiction, in search results.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is one of many suicide and crisis intervention hotlines available to call or text when in need of help.

If you feel like you or someone you know is in immediate danger, you should call 911 (or your country'slocal emergency line) or go to an emergency room to get immediate help.

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Google to display domestic violence hotline on related searches - CNET