Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Victoria.
1. AdWords Report Editor
It’s been a busy few weeks for Google. After announcing that they will be limiting access to the Autocomplete API, this week, they’ve made enhancements to mobile Shopping ads and launched a new AdWords reporting suite, which is due to roll out to everyone in the next few months.
The current reporting system is lacklustre and ugly to look at, so I’m looking forward to checking out what the new Report Editor can do.
According to Google, this new tool
‘lets you explore your account data in brand new ways from within your browser’
and
‘provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you build custom tables and charts that can be segmented, sorted, and filtered to help you find the insights that matter’.
There are definitely some snazzy looking charts in the preview on the Inside AdWords blog, and the drag and drop seems as though it will be easy to use.
I’m just hoping it is as easy to use as it looks, unlike V11 of AdWords Editor – which I still hate. Why is everything down the side instead of emulating the V10 version, what’s with the wack login system, why is it still buggy as hell? I’m not the only one who thinks this either…
2. Robo-Death
Perhaps the person responsible for killing the hitchhiking robot did so after experiencing similar frustrations with AdWords Editor? It’s made me want to smash inanimate objects on a number of occasions, but I guess we’ll never discover their motivation behind this brutal killing.
Anyway, hitchBOT (a hitchhiking robot with big dreams of making it to San Francisco) was having a right good old time making his way around the world, with his knotted hankie on a stick thrown over his squishy pool noodle shoulder, full of hopes and aspirations of where he would go and what he would see during his travels. He was especially excited about travelling around the USA.
hitchBOT travelled to Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada – before being kicked to death and dismembered in an alley shortly after arriving in Philadelphia.
The brutal crime scene below shows that hitchBOT was decapitated, and had his arms wrenched from his torso. The head and brain of hitchBOT has not been recovered.
EXCLUSIVE PHOTO: evidence of vandalized hitchhiking robot in #philly. #hitchBOTinUSA trip is over…. pic.twitter.com/VAjvGQzF3u
— AndreaWBZ (@AndreaWBZ) August 1, 2015
RIP hitchBOT
3. Google, are you sure this is what happened to the dinosaurs?
Google have said time and time again that they work hard to serve users with the most relevant, and accurate information in their search results. Back in February this year, Google hinted that they are working towards ranking pages on facts, not links.
Here is some science stuff they said about it with big words that Will Self would probably approve of:
“The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous* signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies onendogenous** signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy”.
* I had to look it up
**I think they made this word up
Google have been building a massive database of known facts since 2012, so with this in mind, why are debatable results being served over those with more scientific merit?
‘What really happened to the dinosaurs?’ serves me this result in prime position. According to this site:
“Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago. God made the dinosaurs, along with the other land animals, on Day 6 of the Creation Week (Genesis 1:20–25, 31). Adam and Eve were also made on Day 6—so dinosaurs lived at the same time as people, not separated by eons of time.
Dinosaurs: Formed on the sixth day
Dinosaurs could not have died out before people appeared because dinosaurs had not previously existed; and death, bloodshed, disease, and suffering are a result of Adam’s sin (Genesis 1:29–30; Romans 5:12, 14; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22).”
Mystery solved! Someone call the Natural History Museum!
In defence of this, Google have stated that they have never claimed to deliver the best information, and that Google’s search algorithm is designed for efficiency: To provide the results users are most likely looking for and to move them on to their next site as quickly as possible.
That’s all well and good, but if that’s the case then why bother fact checking at all when writing content if Google are just going to deliver information ‘efficiently’ rather than ‘accurately’?
4. Smartphones are the most popular way to get online
No major shockers in the 2015 Ofcom Communication Market Report, which was published this week, but it’s still worth a read if you are looking for stats on the communications market and demographic information.
Smartphones have now overtaken laptops as the most popular way to get online, and people in the UK now spend twice as long online via a smartphone than on a laptop or desktop.
On average, people spend 2 hours per day on their Smartphone, but research suggests that some users are spending way more time faffing about on their phones.
If you get freaked out at the thought of not being able to check your phone every 30 seconds, you might have ‘nomophobia’. If you want to find out, you can take this test.
5. Lexus make hoverboard
Just as Back to the Future predicted back in 1985, we are all going to be riding about on hoverboards in 2015. It was right about a few other things too, like ‘video telephones’ and ‘thumb pads’ – and who doesn’t use the words ‘pissquanced’ and ‘nump’ nowadays?
So Lexus made this thing, and it is kind of a hoverboard, I guess. It also looks like it is constantly on fire. I mean, I suppose it’s pretty impressive – I probably can’t make one that hovers any better.
https://youtu.be/ZwSwZ2Y0Ops
Have a great weekend!
