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"IMAGE: AFP/GETTY IMAGES BY KARISSA BELL SEP 24, 2018 For all its behind-the-scenes innovation, Google Search has looked more or less the same for the last 20 years: You type some words in a search box and get back a list of links.  The company's added lots of bells and whistles over the years, but the core concept has remained the same and the experience has pretty much looked the same. But that will soon be changing. SEE ALSO: Google Search gets a slew of new features on its 20th anniversary   At an event marking the 20th anniversary of search, Google revealed a suite of updates that are meant to fundamentally change the way we search, and how search results look and feel. You'll still see lists of links but, increasingly you'll also see features typically thought of as being squarely in the territory of social media companies: news feeds, vertical video, photo-centric content, and, yes, Stories. A quick recap of some of the specific updates: Google's personalized feed feature, now called "Discover," will be rolling out to all mobile users and to its homepage on desktop. The feed surfaces content based on your interests and search history. You can also save stuff from your feed to topic-based "collections." The company is "doubling down," on Stories, which will start to appear more frequently in search results. In addition to the publisher-created AMP Stories (Mashable is a partner on the initiative), Google will now use AI to automatically create tappable Stories about specific topics, like celebrities.  Google Images is getting a total overhaul, including a new ranking algorithm that will emphasize "evergreen content," like recipes and DIY content.  Google Lens will be integrated directly into Google Images so you can search for specific items within photos."

Is this a form of Culture Jamming? "Swastikas appeared last week in Comcast searches on Google. Google fixed the problem on Thursday, but swastikas inserted into Comcast brand images have been a recurring problem for the nation's largest cable-TV company because of a two-year-old anti-Comcast Reddit page that crowdsourced legions of the company's critics to click on an image of the symbol of Nazi Germany with an embedded Comcast logo. Because tens of thousands of people clicked on the image - more than 60,000, according to the Reddit page - the Google algorithm thinks it's popular and returns it in search results."

"If Stadia works as described, it has the potential to upend how the gaming industry works. But it will also give Google a trove of data it didn't have before. Basic information like what games a user buys, how long they play, and what devices they play on can provide valuable insights that might help Google do what it does best: sell ads. "A good psychologist should be able to watch how most of us game and understand a whole lot about us." But how you play your games may be the most valuable data of all, according to Jon Festinger, a professor at the Centre for Digital Media, a graduate program in Canada that focuses on design. While Google can already gauge your interests or political leanings from things like your search history, video games involve actively making decisions that reveal a surprisingly intimate picture of who you are."

"In reality, Google's goal (and our goal, as Google marketers) is to separate you from as much of your money as possible every time you aren't thinking clearly -and we do so through ads. Micro-moments are so important to Google's bottom line that, since a May 2016 keynote, Google has taught us marketers how to best leverage them against you. We do this by serving the ad best suited to your flavor of impulse, and by making sure we're there for each of those impulses. In a perfect world, marketers would be trained to help you use Google well when you are of an impressionable mind. Instead, we're taught to exploit your befuddlement. Whether you're aware of it or not, you have micro-moments about 150 times per day. You will see ads during most of them. These ads speak to what you seek; play on emotions that are unlike you; and fit your age, income, gender, location, and browsing history"

"In the tests carried out by Ofcom earlier this year, children were shown screenshots of Google search results for the term "trainers" and asked whether the results at the top of the page were either a) ads, b) the most relevant results, or c) the most popular results. Despite the fact that these topmost search results were outlined in an orange box and labelled with the word "Ad," they were only recognized as such by 31 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds and 16 percent of 8- to 11-year-olds. Other tests showed that one in five 12- to 15-year-olds (19 percent) believed that if a search engine listed particular information then it must be true, while just under half of children (46 percent) could say for sure that Google itself was funded by ads."

"Google is reportedly readying its entry into the online TV industry with a YouTube service by the name of "Unplugged," which would feature a skinny bundle of TV channels."

"MORE than a decade into the 21st century, we would like to think that American parents have similar standards and similar dreams for their sons and daughters. But my study of anonymous, aggregate data from Google searches suggests that contemporary American parents are far more likely to want their boys smart and their girls skinny."

"VideoNotes is a free web tool that allows students to take notes on a video they are watching. The notes are synchronized with the video being watched. The good thing about VideoNotes is that it is integrated into Google Drive which means that students will be able to save their notes directly to their Drive account and access, edit, and work on them anytime they want. All the notes are time-stamped. Watch Michelle's tutorial to learn more about how you can use VideoNotes with your students."

The book titled "How Google Works" is not all that much about the inner workings of Google.

"MORE than a decade into the 21st century, we would like to think that American parents have similar standards and similar dreams for their sons and daughters. But my study of anonymous, aggregate data from Google searches suggests that contemporary American parents are far more likely to want their boys smart and their girls skinny. It's not that parents don't want their daughters to be bright or their sons to be in shape, but they are much more focused on the braininess of their sons and the waistlines of their daughters."

"The Atlantic piece "The Binge Breaker" explores Tristan Harris's plan to stop smartphone addiction. He's a former Google employee and the founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that wants the world to disengage more easily from devices. In this interview with PBS Newshour, Harris explains how companies profit from keeping people entranced with their phones. "For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend," he says. "These services are in competition with where we would want to spend our time, whether that's our sleep or with our friends. There's this war going on to get as much attention as possible.""

"What would happen if the most powerful technology company in the world and the largest clandestine spying agency in the world joined forces? No need to wonder. Just look around you. It's happened already. Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, "we the people" have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again."

"Blue chip technology companies grabbed four of the top five spots in the annual ranking of most valuable brands by the consultants at Interbrand."

"The company, the world's largest digital advertiser, is being criticized more and more for its vast data-collection practices, which feed its powerful ad targeting. "

"Want to freak yourself out? I'm going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realizing it."

"ost of us understand by now that we're being followed across the web. But how much do we know about how the smartphone apps we use track our every move? Thanks to tiny pieces of code that millions of developers use to make their lives easier, an array of companies gets free access to data they can employ to understand your habits. The process is invisible, and it's worse news for you than you might think. When we browse the web through Google Chrome, for example, a dizzying array of companies follow us. Such is the Wild West of our modern web, but you still remain in control of which sites you visit and which social networks you log into. The shift to native apps changes this equation, however. Suddenly you're no longer in full control of what's loaded, nor of who is tracking you, and you must trust app developers to do the right thing."

"Googling yourself has become a rite of passage."

"In a 2011 op-ed about media literacy I posited the following questions: "Are you illiterate if you don't know how to interpret a tweet? If you can't tell the difference between fact and fiction on Twitter, does that mean you are lacking media literacy skills?" If you can't make a determination of truth about the content in your Twitter and Facebook feed, or if you can't figure out which sources are trustworthy in a set of Google search results, then all that information is doing you a disservice. As our technology evolves, and our streams become even more packed with tweets, articles, videos, pictures and posts, the concept of media literacy evolves with it."

"Factcheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post are now collaborating by jointly piloting Share the Facts, a widget developed by the Duke Reporters' Lab and Alphabet's technology incubator Jigsaw (formerly known as Google Ideas). Share the Facts structures a fact check's key elements - the claim, its origin and the rating - in a box like the one below."

"As part of our new privacy initiative, we'll discuss themes of social media, surveillance, ethics, and of course, privacy in Eggers' thought-provoking new novel. If you've read the novel (or even part of it) we hope you'll join the conversation!"