Google gamifies its top search results of 2018

While 2018 felt like a rather turbulent year, to say the least, Google wants to soften the blow a bit or focus on the other big news of the year by gamifying its top search results of the year. Game of the Year 2018 will test your knowledge of the top search trends of 2018 in a click-to-choose format. It’s also a good source of random trivia—like who appeared in search results more: Justin Trudeau or Justin Bieber?—you might want to use as you attend more parties during the holidays.

It’s easier to clear out your Google search history

You probably already know that Google has a record of everything you search on Google.com. And while you can clear your local browser history, you couldn’t do the same for what’s stored on Google’s servers. But now, in a move to make Google users more aware of the control they have in their account, it’s easier to access settings to delete your search history. Through this link, you can choose to delete your search activity from the last hour or all your searches. From there you can even get access to control likes disabling ad personalization or stopping Google sites from saving activity.

These changes are coming first to desktop and mobile web with iOS and Android updates to come in the following weeks. The company has plans to expand these changes in the coming year to services like Maps as the company tries to overhaul its privacy controls. It comes at a time when giant tech companies are under scrutiny for what they’re doing to protect user data.

Source: The Verge

Google Search taps into your personal browsing history to show relevant links to you

When you “Google” things, sometimes this means you’re looking for something you’ve searched before.  Google Search is making it easier for you to tap into that by surfacing your “Relevant history” to the top of the search results. It shows you three of the most relevant pages from your browsing history. There is also a View More link to show you other relevant links. These results are meant for your own viewing and convenience. It doesn’t seem to be rolled out to all users yet and looks like a server-side test. It hasn’t shown up for us just yet. Is this a feature you’ll find useful? 

Source: Android Police 

Google starts testing its ‘Google Sans’ font in Search results

Google is slowly bringing its Material Theme to most of its properties. The latest product to get the treatment is its Search on mobile. 9to5Google reports that Google is testing out its “Google Sans” font in the search result pages. This font is a slightly modified version of Product Sans, which Google uses for all its product logos. This font has been showing up on many of Google’s web properties and apps so it comes as no surprise it’s making its way to Search as well.

According to Google, this proprietary font is simply Product Sans optimized to work for different sizes—everything from billboards to mobile phones. As for when it’ll make it to the web, we can’t say just yet but services like Gmail, Google Pay, and Google Drive, have all adopted Material Theme in full or in part so perhaps the change might come sooner than we think.