6 months ago this day Google Reader shut down and the voices of millions of blog posts were suddenly silenced. Although there was a huge outcry before Google reader disappeared, on the actual day it went away it seemed to pass many users by without a word.

Part of the reason was that by this time a few groups had come out with alternative apps for the service so it was easy to miss but also many tweets and blog posts had been written venting their frustration. But 6 months on and the picture has changed a lot. The internet (at least for nerds) looks very different than it did before.

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Backup your RSS feed to a Google spreadsheet using an IFTTT recipe

It is fortunately dead easy to create an RSS feed for a Google Plus profile. All you need is the users Google profile ID and the url that you have to add it to to create the feed.

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Google Glass Makeover - The company noted that the new Google Glass designs build on the Titanium Collection released this past January.
The designer collection will include five new frames and eight new shades.

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A Year After Google Readers Death, How Do You Get Your News?

Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the death of Google Reader. While it is missed, we have moved on — plenty of alternatives have sprung up in its wake.

But we want to know how you get your news in the post-Google Reader world. Did you migrate to alternative services like Feedly, Feedbin or FeedWrangler? Are you using Twitter and Facebook as primary sources of news? Or do you still watch that old-fashioned device in your living room called a TV? Let us know, below.

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Because Feedly sold life-time memberships for a short period last year to the first 5,000 customers, the number of Pro users on a monthly or annual subscription is probably close to 30,000. At $45 each, that is revenue of $1.35 million each year.

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For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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It has been a slow start for Google’s smartwatches. Only 720,000 smartwatches powered by Android Wear, Google’s operating system for wearable devices, shipped in the last six months of 2014, according to research firm Canalys.

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Create a social network or risk everything.

That was the original pitch for Googles Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network's chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the companys top brass.

Gundotra, described by colleagues we spoke with as charismatic and politically-savvy, eventually persuaded Larry Page, the Google cofounder who returned as CEO at the beginning of 2011 after a decade behind the scenes, to turn the company upside down for this cause.

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Google Sheets can monitor competitors prices, capture news headlines, and devour data from websites, CSV files, and more. The tool helps small business owners and marketers gain a competitive advantage.

Google Sheets, the search giant’s cloud-based spreadsheet service, does more than just make your financial statements legible. The service has many powerful functions and features. Three of these may even help your business collect competitor and industry data that could lead to better decisions.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS or Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there is a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query — and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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While there may be businesses that specify in SEO, to many, Google Search Engine Optimization remains a mystery. In fact, Google is constantly making changes, refining how they want results to be displayed to its users.

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Google News will be deprecating their old RSS feed subscription URLs by December 1, 2017. That means if you have Google News RSS feed subscriptions from a year or so ago, you will need to go through all those subscriptions and update them.

To update your RSS feeds, you need to go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.

Google told us the old RSS URLs will no longer work effective December 1, 2017.

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As of December 2017, the new Google Sites lets you embed HTML and JavaScript, as well as other websites. That is a big change from a year ago when the new Google Sites mostly let you share items from Drive, YouTube, and a few other Google sources.

The changes make the new Google Sites an even more useful website and intranet site creation tool.

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With the new Google News, they did not just drop the standout tag and editors pick but it seems like the direct method to subscribe to Google News via RSS and Google News keyword searches is gone. There are still ways to subscribe, but the buttons seem to be gone in the new design.

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Google shutters the Google+ social network after Wall Street Journal reports that outside developers could access data for hundreds of thousands of users data.

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Google Assistant will soon be capable of delivering a personalized audio news feed after users say OK Google, play the news.

This new feature is a collaborative effort with publishers around the world, which brings the artificial intelligence of Google News to the voice context of Assistant.

Google Assistant will be able to assemble an audio news playlist on demand when users issue the appropriate voice command.

News feeds will be created based on what the individual user cares about. Similar to what happens when opening the Google News app.

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Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.

In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won’t be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted.

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Google has officially started the process of shutting down and deleting all consumer accounts on its Google+ social network platform, bringing an end to the company’s attempt to directly compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

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Tyler, Mary E., 1970-

Adding to the plethora of outages that apps from major tech giants have been suffering lately, Google's Calendar refused to work for over nearly three hours for users around the world.

The multinational companies, which hold the largest market shares in the sphere of technology, have decided to put their joint efforts in developing technology that will help world governments to cut the spread of the virus and save lives

Across several presentations at Google Conversions in Dublin, several speakers shared insights and best practices for conversion rate optimization. Here's a few highlights:

Confirmation Bias - Michael Aagaard

• In the 18th century, tobacco smoke was considered very good for your heart and lungs. In particular tobacco enemas were quite popular so much that they were placed along the banks of the river Thames to help drowning victims. This is an example of confirmation bias at work.
• Confirmation biases is our tendency to accept evidence we agree with at face value and dismiss information we don't agree with unless the evidence is overwhelming. Confirmation biases limits our ability to seek out and uncover the truth.
• Torturing data: if you torture any data long enough it will confess to anything. High levels of correlation between things don't imply causation. We have to be careful to not see what we want in data.
• Stopping A/B tests when they show the impact we want is an example of confirmation bias. Instead, let them run for an appropriate amount of time. Over time, tests are likely to show much less effects.
• How to overcome confirmation bias: accept the fact that you could be wrong, seek out a different perspective. Find people who talk to customers/users. They have a bias toward end users.
• Don't test your ideas, do detective work to find out what customers need and how they talk about it. Then your A/B test is simply the final test at the end to see if you did your detective work well.

CRO - Lina Hansson

• Celebrate the discovery of weak spots. Don't take it as failure but instead be happy when you find something that can be improved.
• The biggest missed opportunity in conversion rate optimization is usability testing. Move away from opinions and instead use user testing to identify issues.
• A common pain point across retail sites is find-ability: both search and browse. When we move to mobile, many sites remove their top categories list in order to fit on smaller screens. This creates discoverability issues. One of the first things retail sites should test is adding categories visibly on their home page.
• Value propositions for companies are usually cut for mobile. Instead of removing them, redesign them to make them work on mobile.
• People can be classified into four behavior types. Methodical people read completely and analyze before making decisions. Humanistic people react strongly to the opinions of others. Competitive people move quickly and expect things to work. Spontaneous people are emotional and fast-paced. You can design experiences that are appropriate for each of these behavior types.
• The companies that solve checkout on mobile are the ones that will win.

Meaningful Data - Simo Ahava

• It's quite simple to get a service like Google Analytics set up but how do we use these tools to really understand what we're doing. How can data become meaningful?
• Tactics (tool expertise) without a strategy (business expertise) are just party tricks and a strategy without tactics is just talk. What brings the two together is agility.
• Tools must be customized for your organization's needs. We are not trying to optimize metrics but our businesses. Default metrics and reports need to be adjusted to work with your specific needs.

Landing Pages - Anna Potanin

• Designers want to do their best and create unique interfaces but making things for the Web often requires understanding and using conventions. Only apply a unique visual design after you have followed best practices.
• 3 things all retail sites should have on their landing and home pages: call to action, value propositions, and visuals.
• The more prominent you make your search bar, the more searches you get. Why do you want to do this? Conversion rates are usually much higher for people who search

Google's Chromebook runs only web apps, some of which also work offline.  It's a concept you are either OK with or not into at all.

Corporate bike fleets have become commonplace on sprawling Silicon Valley campuses over the past decade. Apple has campus bikes, as do Facebook, LinkedIn and others. But there’s nothing quite like Google’s.

The Thiel fellows get a dose of Silicon Valley life as they visit Google’s collaborative workspace, The Garage. After a demo of Google Glass, the group gets hands-on with an innovation exercise to hone their creativity and team-building skills.

Google thinks the future of wearables might be making the clothes we already wear connected. It¹s Project Jacquard with Levis may herald a future when a swipe on a sleeve makes a phone call and your pants are talking to the cloud.

Google's self-driving car may look and sound like a giant Roomba but they may also be part of the future of automobile transportation.

How good can an Android phone be? Really, really good.

Google Cardboard and a smartphone are all you need to experience the immersive world of virtual reality. WIRED's Molly McHugh explores apps for news, gaming, and thrills.

The Pixel C shows Google has a lot of work left to do to compete with a growing class of multitasking work tablets says WIRED's David Pierce.

“London Has Fallen” actress Angela Bassett is still alive, thank you very much. The Oscar-nominated actress answers the most googled questions about herself, including whether she’s a vegan and if she starred in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video—(hint: No.)

The match between Google's AlphaGo and a top ranked human player is a way of judging the suddenly rapid progress of artificial intelligence that may show how far these technologies have come—and how far they may go.

Google's new Ai-powered messaging app, Allo, lets you chat with Google while you chat with your friends. It's the first step toward making Google truly conversational.

Google made several announcements at its annual developers conference. As expected the tech giant’s progress with Artificial Intelligence is at the core of many it’s innovations

Google wants to give you a way of using an app without actually downloading it. It's called Instant Apps and Google says it'll be available in a few months.

Google enters the phone fray with the Pixel, a premium Android smartphone with all the features of an iPhone plus Google Assistant and a headphone jack.

The tech giant released a slew of new hardware, including two new smartphones, a VR-headset and a home assistant. Here's everything from the Google event.

Google Home is part Bluetooth speaker, part Google Assistant, all Amazon Echo competitor. For $129, it brings super-powered voice control into every nook and cranny of your house.

Google's new $80 Daydream View isn't just a more integrated VR headset for mobile devices, it's also way comfy.

By this point, self driving cars are a common sight in Silicon Valley and Google’s fleet of nearly 60 autonomous cars hit a milestone: They have now clocked more than two million miles of driving on public streets.

The $129 Home smart speaker plays a vital role in Google’s futuristic vision of “a Google for everyone” powered by its omnipresent Assistant. It sounds like a big deal, but we decided to have some fun with the new assistant instead.

Daydream View, the first mobile headset of Google's new virtual-reality platform, is rock-solid VR at low cost.

Family occasions are stressful especially around the holidays.Google's Chade-Meng Tan shares some mindfulness tricks that'll keep you sane.

Google is getting serious about self-driving cars. So serious that it put a legally blind man in one that drove him around safely on his own. The successful trip means that the tech giant can now launch its own self-driving car company, which it's calling Waymo.

Andy Wood and Matt Kirshen test the limits of everyday AI against a variety of accents in linguistics tests designed to determine which AI is the best at understanding the most people. Featuring Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Siri.

From Google Lens to the the company's new artificial intelligence chip here are the big announcements from Google I/O 2017's first day.

Brent Rose takes Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana and Apple's Siri out for the ultimate test drive; which AI has the best sense of humor? How will a human audience respond to a stand-up set written entirely by smart gadgets?