Google Now Adds Bill Notifications

Google-Now

It looks Google is making it more and more difficult to lead a disorganized life with recent news confirming Google Now will notifiy of impending due dates.

Google has always been one of the biggest convenience of the web.  By crawling and indexing the surface of the internet, Google has made web browsing accessible to anyone that can access a computer.  Additional services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and almost anything else Google does adds massive convenience to every day life.

Google Now is one of the newer Google initiatives and it is the logical extension of Google’s data services.  Google doesn’t only crawl the surface web, now.  The search giant also crawls and indexes any Google services you use in order to provide updates, notifications, and reminders and presents you with information before you need to seek it out yourself.

Google Now doesn’t only provide calendar reminders and weather updates, though.  One of the bigger chunks of data Google Now uses comes from your Gmail account.  If someone includes an address in an email or Ebay sends you a tracking number for a package, Google will see that information in your Gmail and turn it into a card within the Google Now application.

It was recently rumored that Google Now would begin crawling Gmail for bill due dates as well, and that rumor has now been confirmed by Android Police.  Just like how Google Now knows when you order a package from Ebay it will know when you have bills due.

Obviously this feature depends on you having paperless billing enabled.  Google is only able to read information that is in your Gmail account, so if you receive a paper bill, then you won’t get a notification on your phone as well.

This is also dependent on cooperation with the companies to which the bills are owed.  Shortly after Google Now started giving delivery notifications, Amazon removed tracking numbers from their confirmation emails, requiring users to go directly to Amazon to get shipping updates.  Amazon is a Google competitor with their Kindle family, so it remains to be seen if American Express or Comcast will pull a similar stunt.

Not everyone is comfortable with their information being indexed and used in the way it is for Google.  While there are definitely privacy concerns, that’s not stopping most people from taking advantage of the convenience of Google’s various services and  likely won’t be a major deterrent in this case either.

Source: Android Police

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Google bots learning to read webpages like humans, one step closer to knowing everything

Google bots now read webpages more like humans, one step closer to knowing everything

Google just launched its Knowledge Graph, a tool intended to deliver more accurate information by analyzing the way users search. Of course, with a desire to provide better search results comes a need for improved site-reading capabilities. JavaScript and AJAX have traditionally put a wrench in Google bots' journey through a webpage, but it looks like the search engine has developed some smarter specimens. While digging through Apache logs, a developer spotted evidence that bots now execute the JavaScript they encounter -- and rather than just mining for URLS, the crawlers seem to be mimicking how users click on objects to activate them. That means bots can dig deeper into the web, accessing databases and other content that wasn't previously indexable. Looks like Google is one step closer to success on its quest to know everything.

Google bots learning to read webpages like humans, one step closer to knowing everything originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 00:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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