On October 4, Google is expected to release its next flagship smartphone range, dubbed Pixel 2. Here's everything you need to know about these first-party Android handsets, including price, release date and the best features based on the most credible leaks thus far.

Android: If you have an Android device, you most likely have a backup of it stored in your Google Drive account. Unfortunately, as one user discovered, that backup can expire in 60 days if you leave your Android device untouched, even if you have more than enough space to store it yourself.

Backups are wonderful. They provide peace of mind, a way to protect your future self from potential misery. Unless, of course, those backups get deleted with almost no warning, kind of like what Google will do for your Android device if you don't use it for a couple of months.

As the number of images we store on cloud services increases, it gets harder and harder to find that specific image you're looking for. That happened to me just yesterday. I knew what was in the pictures I wanted but there was no easy way to find them. Box is now integrating Google's Cloud Vision APIs into their products to help find images stored on their service.

The most common "how to" search term on Google is "how to tie a tie." And the most common "how to fix" search is "how to fix a door," according to Google's new visual breakdown of the most popular "how to" searches worldwide from 2004 to 2017.

Last week, Google made a confusing announcement that could easily scare the crap out of 800 million people: Google Drive's going away — but actually, no, it's not. However, there are a few things you should know about the changes that are coming.

This week, Google announced that it's replacing its Google Drive apps for Mac and PC with a more functional version, Backup & Sync. You'll still be able to use your cloud storage from Google Drive in the same way, but the updated apps for Mac and PC will let you sync individual folders anywhere on your desktop, as well as manage your cloud photo uploads. Support for the current versions of the Google Drive apps will end on December 11, with the apps shutting down completely on 12 March 2018.

Google's Backup and Sync software will be taking over completely from Google Drive for PC/Mac later this year. Support for Google Drive will terminate on 11 December 2017 and the service will shut down completely on 12 March 2018. For G Suite admins, that means you’ll see settings in the Admin console for Drive File Stream. Google is turning Drive File Stream on today for all customers.

If your efforts to track down long-lost relatives and obscure musicians (or anyone else you're looking for on the web) stop at Googling their name, you've come to the right place. Here's how to seriously go about searching for people online, including some advice from the professionals who do it for a living. Oh, and if you'd rather not be found yourself, than read on to understand exactly how the pros go about finding those who'd prefer to stay hidden.

Your favourite technology company, Google, is working on an upcoming feature that could put the kibosh on autoplaying videos for good. Soon you'll be able to silence the worst offenders permanently, saving you the headache of searching for a mute button over and over again.

Slowly, steadily, Google has been adding features to Chrome to give users more control over the multimedia powers of tabs. Flash was the first target and over the last few years, audio has clearly been the follow-up. Now it seems Google plans to provide the ultimate in sound gatekeeping — muting of entire websites.

Google has added a new firewall feature to their cloud offering. Currently in beta, the App Engine firewall, which is in beta, lets developers specify a set of rules, order them by priority and specify an IP address or a set of IP addresses. These are used to block or allow access to an application.

With Microsoft's cloud and hardware business units continuing to grow, Google is fighting back with the launch of Chrome Enterprise. This is a new version of Chrome OS that adds a bunch of management and security features that bolster the comany's efforts to push further into the business market.

It’s no secret that Google knows a lot about its users. The tech giant collects tons of data about you, including your search history, location, and voice searches that help improve Google’s services and provide relevant ads. However, you might be surprised to know Google can easily take a look at all of the data it has on you. Here's how you can find out what the tech giant knows about your online habits and personal information.

After being made available to developers back in March, and then more broadly through a public beta in May, the eighth major release of the Android operating system finally arrives today with Google revealing that the mysterious "O" actually stands for Oreo: A sandwich cookie suffering from a terrible identity crisis over the past few years.

From snapping photos with a mobile phone to streaming music through a browser, much of the tech trickery we take for granted in 2017 looks simple on the surface but involves a complex series of computations and calculations behind the scenes to make the magic happen. As an example, take Google.com.

If you're a professional photographer who assumed that slapping an obtrusive watermark across your work would protect it from being misused online, Google has some bad news for you. A team of researchers from the company has found a way to automatically and perfectly erase the watermarks used by popular stock photography organisations.

At a for-profit editorial outlet like Lifehacker, when we need an image for our posts, we can't just do a Google image search and slap up the first result. We have to use properly licensed photos. Sometimes we use our own original photos, sometimes stock images that we pay for, sometimes the millions of Flickr photos licensed for free use through Creative Commons.

It's become common for companies such as Google to do targeted software releases, limiting access through region, platform or device. For Google Search Lite, a snappier and slimmer version of the current Search app, is currently restricted to just a few locations... and none of them are Australia. Fortunately, you can manually install the APK if you want to give it a try.