The Verge reporter Chaim Gartenberg recently learned a harsh lesson about the power of Google's autocomplete feature when he tried to do an innocent search for a character from the brand-new God of War game. Wham! Spoiler, right there in the autocomplete field. He didn't even make it to the (spoiler-filled) results.

Until now, when Google trawls the internet creating its vast index, it looked at the desktop version of your website. But that is changing. So you’ll need to ensure your mobile site is tweaked in order to maintain your page ranking.

Google Trends just released its Year in Search 2017, including the top 10 "how to" searches. As it turns out, Lifehacker has answered eight out of 10. And those last two weren't really relevant to Australians.

Finding a podcast is easy; finding relevant episodes is harder. If you want to find, say, all of Paul F. Tompkins's guest appearances, or podcast episodes about the Russian Revolution, try the podcast search engine Listen Notes.

Well, looks like the jig is up for cheapskate news junkies. Search giant Google has decided to discontinue its trick that granted freeloading site visitors access to articles that are meant to be behind paywalls.

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.

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.

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.

Sites are constantly changing, updating with stories and even new layouts, making it a challenge to find something you read or saw years ago. If your online writing is on a third-party site, anything they do could spell the end of your work online. In today's political climate, keeping a record of political promises or missteps is more important than ever. If you're not using Archive.org's Wayback Machine to dig up (or save) old pages, tweets about your former employer, or images, you should get in the habit.

Google's search engine is an always-expanding, extremely useful tool that's packed with tons of different tools. Over on Zapier, they outline tons of different advanced tricks for searching Google as quickly as possible.

If there's something you don't like about yourself on the web, usually Google isn't going to remove it from search results. If you complain, though, Google will remove web pages that include your bank account numbers and other sensitive information. And recently, they added medical records to the list of things they will remove upon request.

In the world of online shopping, coming out on top in search results is a big deal. And if you’re the king of search, as Google is, and you have aspirations of being a major player in ecommerce then you could abuse your power in search to queue jump your competitors. The EU has found Google has been pushing its own products up in search rankings in order to gain what to says is an unfair market advantage. And it’s going to cost Google over AUD$4B in fines.

Google's been making strides toward the creepy over the past few weeks. Last week the company figured out how to tie real-world credit card transactions to its own advertising network to further its ad platform effectiveness. This week, Google has started experimenting on some user's search pages: They will take your personal data and display it next to some traditional search data with the hopes that you'll eventually look for everything through their classic search box.

It seems like a lot of web pages are disappearing from the internet these days. If you feel like taking on archiving duties for yourself, there are a variety of tools for doing so.

When you type a question into Google Search, you'll often get a complete answer right at the top of the page. These featured answers can be a great time-saver, but they can also be dead wrong.

Google pushed out a big update to Google Earth for Chrome and Android today. Alongside a snazzy new look, the new version adds guided tours, 3D maps and a random button.

Yelp has added a new business attribute to their listings that shows where you'll find gender neutral bathrooms.

Google added the ability to search within apps from the search bar in Android a while ago. Now, it's added one of the most useful reasons to do so. You can finally find your Drive files from the search box.

Stack Overflow is filled with thousands of questions and answers, and many of those are book recommendations from programmers with many different levels of skill. Dev-Books collects together the most recommended books.