Google has made a deal with the Australian government to pay royalties to media companies for providing search results that drive traffic to their content. Meanwhile, Facebook has decided to turn off news links altogether. The result is that all traffic going to media sites in Australia will disappear overnight. Leo says it'll be interesting to see who blinks first.
Jerry wants to know if Google search has a date when a website was last updated. Leo says that would be a cool feature, and Google used to do that. Leo says there is a button on Google's search settings for ADVANCED. You can narrow results by the last update. That will weed out anything that isn't too old.
Rick has created a GoFundMe campaign, but it can't be found through searching on Google. What is happening? Leo says it should. But its Page Rank may be low because it isn't being linked to. So he should get some friends to link to it through social media. That'll help it show up.
Beginning in July, if your website isn't secure (with an https url), it will warn anyone coming to your site that it isn't. It'll start in Chrome with a warning that "this site is insecure." Leo says it will start with a shaming technique of just a warning, but eventually, it will start bouncing any site that doesn't comply.
Bob has found that the search feature in his YouTube app has stopped working. He uninstalled and reinstalled it, and it worked shortly, but then stopped working again. Leo says that it could be anything from the app itself, to the service, to the iPad itself. Leo suggests talking to the genius at the Apple Store. Meantime, he should try resetting his network settings.
Aaron has an iPhone 7 and when he has to search for a website, there's a CAPTCHA challenge, but when he types it in, it doesn't do anything at all. He says it never happens on Wi-Fi, just on cellular. Leo says that could indicate that his carrier is sending him the CAPTCHA and it could be broken on their end. Google has a tech note called Unusual Traffic from your Computer Network and it talks about this similar error. The CAPTCHA is there to be sure there isn't a robot running the search.
Gary has been looking for an alternative for desktop search. Leo says that X1 is his favorite, but you have to pay for it. It starts searching as you type, which makes it really fast. It searches into emails, documents, and everything using keywords. Copernic is still around as well, but it's dated. X1 is modern and up to date. It's the king of the hill.
The police department in Edina, MN has secured the right to look at people's Google Search history to look for information about a fraud case they were investigating. The legal brief is to cover anyone who searched for the name of the suspect and case, and it could be the entire community.
Leo says it's crazy and that Google should fight this tooth and nail. It's classic government overreach. Leo says he doesn't mind Google's algorithm putting custom ads on his search results, but for a government to ask who searched for something and to get a list is frightening.
Stan is an author and he uses WordPress for his website. He has it as a forwarding address. Does that affect his search engine results? Leo says not really. the Google crawler follows links. So there's no worry there.
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Yahoo has been sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion.
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