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The company now lets you find your photos both on Google+ and Google Search just by, well, searching for them.

this goes further than just serving you a list of all your photos; Google says it has now also started using computer vision and machine learning to understand what your query.

What’s amazing here is that these results are not being served based on tags, captions, or other ways to denote what is in a given photo. Google is analyzing the content of all your photos and deciding which ones are relevant to your query.

Page post link ads delivered a 53 percent ROI. Page post photo ads delivered a 24 percent ROI. Page post ad units delivered an ROI 26 times higher than right-hand-side ad units. Page post photo ads delivered a 37 percent higher click-through rate than page post link ads and 20 times the CTR of right-hand-side ads. The cost per click for page post photo ads was 17 percent lower than the CPC for page post link ads and right-hand-side ads. Page post link ads delivered a 30 percent higher action rate than page post photo ads, as well as a 55 percent higher rate of purchasing users (the rate of purchasing users were 61 percent higher than for right-hand-side ads).

Page post link ads typically perform well for lead-generation campaigns and are effective in converting users off site. Page post photo ads are designed to capture attention with larger, more engaging photos, creating a seamless experience between paid, owned and earned media. Our study shows that this ad format demonstrated a higher CTR at a lower CPC resulting in a higher ROI than ads on the right-hand side.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

Facebook announced to advertisers that it has gotten better at measuring its own 20 percent rule — the guideline that an image advertisement can contain no more than 20 percent text.

There are two things that don’t count against the 20 percent rule: Pictures of products that include text on the actual product Photos of products in real situations or photos of products with a background

Share breaking news updates: Lavrusik and Hershkowitz said posts that included the terms “breaking” or “breaking news” saw engagement 57 percent higher than non-breaking news posts

Use a conversational tone and include analysis: Posts with a personal tone or clever language saw engagement of 120 percent above the average, and posts with analysis received 20 percent more referral clicks.

Start conversations by asking questions and responding: Posts with prompts for conversation of questions saw engagement 70 percent above the average

visual breaks -- like a line or rule -- discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break, like a blurb. (This also affects ads

We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb. In other words, most people just look at the first couple of words -- and only read on if they are engaged by those words.

People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don't view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on. On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention.

to determine if any given Page post shows up in the news feed, Facebook looks at four main factors: If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you Like every post by a Page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that Page. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a Page. If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the Page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012.

Let’s say Darth Vader posts that he and Luke Skywalker have confirmed that they are father and son. To determine if Yoda saw this post in his news feed, Facebook would look at: whether Yoda had Liked or interacted with posts by Vader in the past, if Leia and Han Solo Liked the relationship post by Vader when Facebook showed it to them, whether Yoda tended to interact with relationship change posts in the past, and whether anyone else had complained about Vader or this particular post by the Sith Lord.

Facebook says it adjusts the way in which it weights these factors to try to increase engagement and general satisfaction. Maybe reach decreases on some Pages, but people interact more with the news feed overall, according to Cathcart.

an example a search for a spicy meal in San Francisco. A search for "restaurants liked by my friends from India" revealed a long list. Narrowing that to "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India" yielded another list. Then he searched for restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.

In cases where Graph Search comes up blank – which is likely to be a frequent occurrence in its infancy – the service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.

"I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones," he said, "but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me."

In 2009, a Facebook account holder Liked, on average, 4.5 Pages. In just four years, this number increased to an average of 40 Pages! Not only that, but brands have been expanding their use of social media in their marketing campaigns, raising the number of Facebook posts that they make from an average of five times per month to 36. This means that in 2009, Facebook users only had to keep up with a manageable 23 updates per month, whereas they are currently bombarded with around 1 440 updates per month!

Some countries Like even more Pages than the 40 Page average, making them even harder to penetrate. The US takes the lead, Liking a whopping 70 Pages! The UK and France are tied, with their Facebook users Liking 48 Pages, on average. Mexican Facebook users follow closely, Liking an average of 41 Pages.

Our figures show that FMCG brands in the US may find it especially difficult to reach their fans, as this industry has the most Liked Pages.

We uploaded over half a million variations of Harlem Shake to YouTube in the past few months. Google searches for Cat GIFs hit an all-time high last month.

The research showed us that far from distracting us from more serious things, these viral pictures, videos, and memes reconnect us to an essential part of ourselves. And by understanding what’s at the root of our obsession with the visual web, brands can create the kind of content that resonates in today’s culture.

It may seem that all we’re doing is just capturing every mundane moment. But look closely. These everyday moments are shot, displayed, and juxtaposed in a way that offers us a new perspective. And then all of a sudden these everyday moments, places, and things look . . . fascinating.

There were 2.4 billion people on the internet at the end of 2012, up 8% from 2011.

While many Facebook advertisers justly focus on the US, UK and Western Europe, a lot can be said about considering other countries.  India, Indonesia and Brazil and Mexico are among the top 5 countries on Facebook according to Socialbakers.

Compared to TV, there is a significant discrepancy in the amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices relative to advertising spend.  While we spend 12 percent of our time on mobile devices, mobile advertising dollars only account for 3 percent of total spending.

Instagram manufactured a predictable response inside Yin’s brain. Her behavior was reshaped by a reinforcement loop which, through repeated conditioning, created a connection between the things she sees in world around her and the app inside her pocket. When a product is able to become tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.” Unlike external triggers, which are sensory stimuli, like a phone ringing or an ad online telling us to “click here now!,” you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger. Internal triggers manifest automatically in the mind and creating them is the brass ring of consumer technology. We check Twitter when we feel boredom. We pull up Facebook when we’re lonesome. The impulse to use these services is cued by emotions.

o get users using, Instagram followed a product design pattern familiar among habit-forming technologies, the desire engine.

The minimalist interface all but removes the need to think. With a click, a photo is taken and all kinds of sensory and social rewards ensue. Each photo taken and shared further commits the user to the app. Subsequently, users change not only their behavior, but also their minds.

The embedding tool that the agency announced will give websites and social media users access to roughly 40 million images — out of a digital collection of 60 million — via a small snippet of computer code that is easily copied. It can be included to illustrate a blog post, for example, or a post to Twitter. (In the case of the images not included, Getty lacks the appropriate permissions, Mr. Peters said.)But, crucially, these users will not be making a copy of those images. Instead, the images will be stored on the agency’s computers; each embedded image will include a credit and a link back to the Getty Images website, where higher-quality versions will be available to license.