When is this mysterious date upon which your device will stop receiving updates? This list from Google lists devices by manufacturer and model along with their “expiration” dates. When it comes to Chromebooks, there’s one big thing you need to know before you buy - something that isn’t obvious and is not widely known:Ĭhromebooks will only receive software updates from Google for a limited period of time.Įvery Chrome device receives regular updates from Google until it reaches its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date When a device reaches AUE, automatic software updates from Google will no longer be provided. In the market for a new laptop, perhaps for Back to School? Considering a Chromebook? After all, it’s all about getting results. The takeaway: Don’t be afraid to try out search engines other than Google Search. Ultimately, it is about delivering useful (to you!) search results that you can use. In addition to that aquatic animal named search engine, Microsoft (*gasp* yes, that Microsoft) Bing and the new (as of this writing) Brave Search are two options worth a try. So what’s the answer? I can’t say there is one magic bullet to cure this problem in one shot, but rather will point out that, contrary to the now popular term, “Google it,” there are search engines out there other than Google Search. How helpful is that? (Yes, you can drill into the search settings and specify a date range for search results, such as no older than a year, for example, but it becomes quite tedious to have to do that just about every time.) The frustration here with search results from Google? Far too often the initial page of results would include years-old webpages or forum posts regarding similar topics for software or hardware that is, at the time the search was conducted, already multiple years out-of-date and/or defunct. This led me to turn to an unconventional source to get actual hands-on product reviews: YouTube.Īnother constellation of searches that resulted in near-useless results from Google Search is technical related queries for various things such as software configurations, Android settings, etc. Searching on Google for product reviews would frequently not offer actual reviews but rather lists and other top 10 type sites that were basically, well, useless junk. This type of search is where my frustration with Google Search began.

Take, for instance, searching for product reviews when evaluating products for potential purchase. One measure of this is the quality of results rendered for certain types of searches. Google Search has become so ubiquitous that its very name has been transformed into a common verb used to describe the activity of web search itself.īut while Google Search is by far the most used search engine, is it the “best”? Is there even such a thing as “best” when it comes to search engines? “To Google” (verb): To look up a search term with the Google search engine.

Digital Me by J.M. Varner