Google is not only one of the biggest contributors to the open source community but also has a strong track record of delivering open source tools and platforms that give birth to robust technology ecosystems. Just witness the momentum that Android and Kubernetes now have. Recently, Google launched a new home for its open source projects, processes, and initiatives. The site runs deep and has several avenues worth investigating. Here is a tour and some highlights worth noting.

We’ve all been there. On Android or Gchat or Gmail, you try to send a crying emoji, or a grin. Basic stuff, really. But when you click the icon, you’re suddenly reminded that Google’s emoji are atrocious. Call them melted marshmallows, or congealed dollops of lard. Mutant egg yolks or Clippy’s deformed, inbred cousins. These lumpy, misshapen visages aren’t just ugly. They don’t match the emoji used by Apple or Microsoft.

We’ve known for a while now that Google is working on a mysterious new operating system known as “Fuchsia.” Unlike Android or Chrome OS that are based on Linux, Fuchsia is built on a new, Google-built kernel called “Magenta” instead. It turns out Fuchsia has come a long way from the command line form it existed in when it was first uncovered last August. Google has since added an early user interface to its new operating system featuring a card-based design, as can be seen in Ars Techinca’s gallery of images and the video below.

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017.

They spent years testing Google's algorithms—then everything changed.

Google Maps is one of the company's most popular services, but when it comes to bringing in revenue, Maps is not pulling its weight. That's by design — Google admits it has been slow to monetize the app. "We take a long term view," Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a Wall Street analyst who inquired about potential plans to turn Maps into a more significant moneymaker during the company's Q1 earnings call on Thursday.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai cashed in big during his first full calendar year at the helm of the Internet giant, nearly doubling his total compensation to $200 million in 2016. Pichai received a salary of $650,000 last year, slightly less than the $652,500 he earned in 2015. But the long-time Google employee, who was named CEO during the company's re-organization in August 2015, received a stock award of $198.7 million in 2016, roughly double his 2015 stock award of $99.8 million.

And Windows 10 S is no Chrome OS either.

Google’s servers in Cuba went live on Wednesday, making the internet giant the first foreign internet company to host content within the long cut-off country. The servers are part of Google’s global network of caching servers, called GGC nodes, the servers work by storing popular content — like a viral YouTube video — on a local server. Instead of having to travel the long distance through a submarine cable, which currently connects Cuba to the internet through Venezuela, Cubans will now be able to access content through the nearest Google server in their country.

Google has been cooking up a LinkedIn competitor of sorts, as a new Google Hire job application management platform just went live. It's still in the early stages for now and Google has yet to make an official announcement, but it looks promising.

AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool that pairs the magic of machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast.

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

Search engine (and SEO) blog with tips and announcements to connect your website or app with Google Searchers and Search Console (Webmaster Tools).

Google and Intertrust today announced the launch of PatentShield, a new program that aims to help defend startups from patent litigation — in return for a stake in those companies. The basic idea here is to give startups that join the program ownership of a selection of patents from Google’s and Intertrust’s portfolio that they can then use as a deterrent against potential patent litigation from established players in their fields.

Waymo, the Google self-driving-car spinout, dropped a bombshell claim in court on Wednesday.

It’s just over a year since Google’s DeepMind unit stunned the world when its AlphaGo AI beat Go legend Lee Se-dol 4-1 in a five-game match; the result demonstrated mastery of a feat that had eluded computer scientists for decades and sparked a flood of new interest in the field of artificial intelligence. But there was one possible “gotcha” that Go devotees could hold onto: Lee Se-dol was once, but is no longer, quite considered the greatest player on the planet.

Commentary: Offering his predictions for the future, the Apple co-founder has faith in tech's big three.

Jonathan Taplin reveals how three companies subverted the internet’s utopian ideals

Several inventors of Google's machine learning processor are working with venture capitalist Palihapitiya on a stealthy chip start-up.

Have you ever thought how long it takes to actually move or copy content from one place to another in your smartphone? If you haven’t, just think once. Ok let me help you: Moving files from a SD card to a phone memory or vice versa requires at least 8 taps (Yes, I calculated that while using my default file manager). Not just files, copying text from one app to another take 20 seconds.

Google has promised to alter its search results to punish websites promoting extreme views, conspiracy theories and fake news.

In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Google vs. Death about Calico, a then-new Google-run health venture focused on understanding aging — and how to beat it. “We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done,” Google CEO Larry Page told Time. But how exactly would Calico help humans live longer, healthier lives? How would it invest its vast $1.5 billion pool of money? Beyond sharing the company’s ambitious mission...

Nothing is more annoying than losing your Wi-Fi connection when binge watching your favourite TV show or video chatting in a business meeting. From spotty connections to dropped signals, leave your Wi-Fi troubles behind with the help of Google Wifi, launching today in Canada. Google Wifi is a new kind of home Wi-Fi system that works with your modem and internet provider to give you strong, reliable coverage, in every room.

Holland is one of the greatest countries to live in, but the biggest downside is that it rains 145 days a year. That’s why the Google Cloud Platform team in the Netherlands is launching Google Wind this Spring.

Books can do anything. As Franz Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” It was Kafka, wasn’t it? Google confirms this. But where did he say it? Google offers links to some quotation websites, but they’re generally unreliable. (They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain.)

Google has been busy with 1,653 launches, 9,800 live traffic experiments, 18,015 side-by-side experiments and 130,336 search quality tests.

Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services Google’s killed off over the years.

A little under five years ago, I got angry about a piece of fake information, and I decided to do something about it.

Google’s security AI has become so smart, it can now tell whether you’re a human or a robot without asking you to check a box or solve annoying puzzles… most of the time, anyway. We’ve all come across CAPTCHAs, those challenges that ask you to type in the characters you see in scrambled images (the a acryonym means Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). As bots and spammers became more sophisticated, it seemed CAPTCHA’s were getting harder and harder for even regular old humans to solve.

Google's Street View added one of the world's largest boiling lava lakes in the Marum crater, an active volcano on the Vanuatuan island of Ambrym.

ome Kansas City residents who have been waiting years for Google Fiber to install service at their homes recently received e-mails canceling their installations, with no word on whether they'll ever get Internet service from the company. KSHB 41 Action News in Kansas City, Missouri, "spoke to several people, living in different parts of the metro, all who have recently received cancellation e-mails," the station reported last week. "The e-mails do not provide a specific reason for the cancellations. Instead they say the company was 'unable to build our network to connect your home or business at this time.'"

The self-driving cars wars have triggered vicious shenanigans over top engineering talent

Google’s Featured Snippets are not only often wrong, they’re also damaging to small businesses that depend on search traffic. CelebrityNetWorth.com launched in 2008 because Brian Warner, a former finance major working at a digital media company, wondered what Larry David was worth. “Honestly, I wanted to know how much money Larry David had,” Warner said. “I think Curb Your Enthusiasm had just come back, and I was like, ‘God, he must have made so much money from Seinfeld.’...

Six months after launch, Google inexplicably still can't keep its phones in stock — and it continues to be a critical flaw with its phone strategy. April 20 marked the six-month anniversary of the Google Pixel going on sale in the Play Store. As was typical for a Google phone launch, they were tough to get ahold of — backorders reached weeks or even months, depending on what model you wanted. Now, six months later, Google inexplicably still can't keep Pixels in stock. Just head to the Google Store right now and see that most configuration combinations aren't available.

Think the name “Google,” and for most, the first thing that comes to mind is the company’s founding, eponymous product: Google Search. But it soon might be A.I. Google’s first, and still most profitable venture has become so popular for web searches that its name is now the verb to search, and yet in a call to investors Thursday, reporting the company’s Q1 2017 earnings, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s in translation.