by Areti Vassou
Hey Google!
“Tell me something good” isn’t meant to be a magic solution. But it’s an experiment worth trying because it’s good info about good work that may bring some good to your day. Give it a go yourself on any Assistant-enabled device, including your phone, Smart Display, or Google Home.
Tell Me Something Good is your daily dose of good news direct from your Google Assistant. Get a 2-3 sentence news summary about people who are working to solve problems for our communities and our world.
The stories are curated through the lens of solutions journalism by our partners at Solutions Journalism Network. Tell Me Something Good is an experimental feature for the U.S.
The stories come from a wide range of media outlets, curated and summarized by the Solutions Journalism Network. They’re a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to spreading the practice of solutions journalism, which highlights how problems are solvable and that doing better is possible.
Solutions journalism empowers and energizes audiences, helping to combat negative news fatigue. It’s an important part of a balanced news diet, so we’re exploring how to incorporate more solutions journalism wherever you access Google News.
Good News
This is good news like how Georgia State University coupled empathy with data to double its graduation rate and eliminate achievement gaps between white and black students, how backyard beekeepers in East Detroit are bringing back the dwindling bee population while boosting the local economy, and how Iceland curbed teen drinking with nightly curfews and coupons for kids to enroll in extracurricular activities.
Google News Initiative
Read more updates on Google’s effort to help news organizations and journalists thrive in the digital age. Discover the magic here>>
Meet Google
The Google company was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most widely used web-based search engine.
Page and Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm – at first known as “BackRub” – in 1996. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003.
This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world’s largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company, Alphabet Inc.
The search engine went through numerous updates in attempts to combat search engine optimization abuse, provide dynamic updating of results, and make the indexing system rapid and flexible. Search results started to be personalized in 2005, and later Google Suggest autocompletion was introduced. From 2007 Universal Search provided all types of content, not just text content, in search results.
Google has engaged in partnerships with NASA, AOL, Sun Microsystems, News Corporation, Sky UK and others. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005. Google was involved in a 2006 legal dispute in the US over a court order to disclose URLs and search strings, and has been the subject of tax avoidance investigations in the UK.
The name Google is a variant of googol, chosen to suggest very large numbers.
There are no limitations if you are willing to get out of your comfort zone!
– Areti Vassou
