Google Helps Fight Child Porn

By Digital Trends Staff April 14, 2008

Google Helps Fight Child Porn Google might have its critics from time to time, but company employees can also do a lot of good. A group of them have taken a program originally developed totrack copyrighted videos posted on YouTube without permission and adapted it in order to search for patterns in abuse images online and also track child predators. The work has been done forthe National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and was done on the company’s “20% time,” under which employees are allowedto give one-fifth of their time to projects they start, whether they’re for the company or for good causes. The big problem for analysts has been the sheer amount of data; in the lastsix years the NCMEC has had to go through 13 million images and videos of child abuse, with five million in the last year alone. Google’s tools will greatly speed up that analysis. Google research scientist Shumeet Baluja said in a blog posting, “With these tools, analysts will be able to more quickly and easilysearch NCMEC’s large information systems to sort and identify files that contain images of child pornography. In addition, a new video tool we built streamlines analysts’ review of videosnippets,” and added, "You always hope that your work will eventually be used to do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real."

Digital Trends Staff

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Computing

This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.

Mobile

Google Flights is making it easier to find the best-priced airfare

Plane landing.

Up till now, airfare search results on Google Flights have prioritized a combination of price and convenience over cost alone. This means you might be missing the cheapest options and spending more than you need to.

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What is Gemini Advanced? Here’s how to use Google’s premium AI

Google Gemini on smartphone.

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What is Google Gemini Advanced?