Google to invest in new data centre in Finland

Pakistani computer scientist receives IBM's highest award

Google owner Alphabet Inc said it would invest 600 million euros ($672 million) in a new data centre in Hamina, Finland, it said, according to a report by Finnish STT news agency on Monday.

Google already has one data centre in Hamina, Finland and its other European data centres are located in the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium.

Meanwhile, Google has confirmed today that it has fixed the indexing issue. Search Engine Land was first to report the new issue of new content not being indexed by Google. Later Google confirmed the issue saying "We're looking into a new indexing issue that started escalating 6 hours ago. The issue is unrelated to yesterday's outage and we're working hard to resolve it. We'll update this thread when we can provide more information."

Two and a half days later, Google confirmed the issue has now been resolved. It did seem Google mostly fixed the issue on Friday but Google didn't confirm the issue to be fully fixed until today. Google said "This issue has been resolved - thanks for your patience! Wishing you all a great week." Danny Sullivan from Google told us Friday afternoon that the issue was mostly resolved but not fully resolved. "I believe it's related to picking up fresh content because as you saw from the reports, this we're time restricted," Danny added. He also said this was different from the previous indexing issue, he said "but it's a different issue that's causing that versus the one earlier this week."

Google had an indexing issue with new content on May 22nd and resolved that on May 23rd. It is believes that specific issue was an issue with Google's indexing queue being backlogged and having to clear out. It is not clear why this new issue was different.

Just last month, Google was plagued with de-indexing issues across the Google index. The Search Console reports had lost data as a result and the cache is not right. In addition, Google had an issue with selecting the right canonical URL and also had an indexing issue with Google News. It has been a tough couple of months for Google search.

Moreover, Google starting to show hotel price charts in search results. These graphs have been a popular feature of Google travel properties and were tested in search last year.

Searchers can use arrows to move forward and back in order to see historical pricing trends for particular hotel properties. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson told us, "Our research has shown that travelers are looking primarily for price and availability information when searching for a hotel. To make our hotel search experience more useful for travelers and better connect them with travel providers, we are surfacing more price and availability information on the search results page." The original tip came from Damian Rollison of Brandify.

LOS ANGELES: A Pakistani computer scientist recently made the country proud by being honored with IBM's highest award, making her the first Pakistani scientists to ever receive it. Pakistani computer scientists Asma Zaheer was honored with the multinational IT firm IBM's highest esteemed award ' Best of IBK 2019'. The award made Asma the first ever citizen to receive this award from an American MNC.

According to local media, the award ceremony, held at Indonesian province Bali this week, was attended by IBM's senior leaders, 1,000 'Best of IBM (BOI) Honorees' and their guests. The honorees were being awarded because of their contributions made for IBM's growth and positioning it as the leader in AI, Cyber Security, Hybrid Cloud, and Analytics.

Asma did her Bachelor's in Computer Science from University of the Punjab (PU), and later did her Master's from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST), Lahore. She has been working at IBM Pakistan since 2013 with her current designation being IGNITE & Test Innovation Practice Leader for IBM's Global Business Services, Client Innovation Center (CIC). The winners were selected from all business units and roles. The award was meant for those IBM employees who work tirelessly to increase the company's and client's success globally. People from all across the country took to Twitter to congratulate Asma over her accomplishment and making the country proud.

Google has been upgrading its various travel properties at an accelerating pace. At Google Marketing Live two weeks ago the company announced a consolidated travel planning tool called Trips.

Earlier, in March, Google introduced a new Hotel search and booking site which

includes vacation rentals. And late last year, a new look for the Hotel Local Pack rolled out.

Travel is a critical vertical, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually in consumer and business travel spending, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

Digital ad spending by travel brands is expected to exceed $9 billion in 2019. Google's travel property upgrades and enhanced search results are part a bid for more of those ad dollars, as the company captures an increasing share of consumer traffic and conversions.