As everyone begins to cozy up for the holidays, we figure it’s time for the second edition of tech stories we couldn’t help but share. Make yourself a hot toddy and put your feet up by the fire, or the monitor, or whatever you put your feet next to… and take in some of the articles we’ve been sharing among ourselves over the past month.
Newsstand by flickr member Takashi Toyooka
Google goes mobile first
If Google doesn’t make you prioritize your mobile experience, nothing will. In early November, the search engine generated some conversation when it announced that it was working to make its index mobile first. In other words, Google’s algorithms will start using the mobile version of a site’s content to index and rank pages from that site. This is a big deal. If you still haven’t given your mobile experience the love it deserves, start by following the pointers in this Google Webmaster Central post.
To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content…
How Facebook unwittingly became a propaganda machine
There has been a lot of speculation about how Facebook impacted the outcome of the 2016 election. The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller dives in, exploring how a cocktail of self-sorting and Facebook algorithms contributed to the wildfire consumption of propaganda and misinformation.
‘As long as it’s on Facebook and people can see it . . . people start believing it,’ President Obama said right before the election. ‘It creates this dust cloud of nonsense.’
The failure of Facebook democracy
Uber dabbles in A.I.
With the acquisition of Geometric Intelligence, Uber has become the latest Silicon Valley tech company to start dabbling in artificial intelligence. Uber’s newly minted A.I. Labs are tasked with applying artificial intelligence to the development of self-driving vehicles, and using machine learning to solve technological challenges.
Instead of training machines by feeding them enormous amounts of data, what if computers were capable of learning more like humans by extrapolating a system of rules from just a few or even a single example?
Uber bets on artificial intelligence with acquisition and new lab
What are you reading?
Don’t leave us alone in our little information bubble. We’d love to see the posts and articles that got you thinking and sharing this fall. Post your favourite tech stories in the comments below. Maybe we’ll cover them in January’s link roundup.
