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Posts tagged "History"

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Got a blank YouTube homepage? You may now need to turn on your watch history
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YouTube users from across the internet have reported encountering a homepage completely devoid of content. That’s because the platform has decided it will no longer provide video recommendations if an account's watch history has been turned off “and [has] no significant prior [history]” available. 

The company quietly made the announcement on a support page explaining certain features like your personal home feed require a watch history to function normally. Moving forward, users who won’t allow YouTube to keep track will only see a search bar at the top of their page plus the four buttons on the left-hand guide menu. The platform states this update is to provide people a “more streamlined [experience] for those… who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations.” It can also push users to become more acquainted with subscribed channels or the Topics tab as they won’t be distracted by a wall of videos.

Rolling out

A YouTube Community Manager said these changes will be rolling out slowly, “over the next few months” starting today, but as stated earlier, a few already have the update. Posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit show the blank home pages on the YouTube mobile app as well as on desktop. All you’ll see is a window stating your watch history setting is currently disabled. 

You can check if the patch has reached your account by going over to your Google Account’s Activity Controls. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the YouTube History entry where you can turn it off or make a few adjustments. Return to your account and see if anything’s different. 

watch history entry in Activity Controls

(Image credit: Future)

User response

The response from users has been mixed. On one hand, you have people who are pretty happy, even ecstatic, since their YouTube account will be a lot cleaner. Home feeds won’t be inundated with unwelcome content just because they played a random video one time. Others, however, are less keen stating this kills a “huge part” of YouTube. Part of the fun is having the algorithm feed you videos you may like, leading you to discover hidden gems on the site. Some simply don't like the idea of having a completely empty home page or needing to reactivate their watch history.

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Now if only YouTube would allow us to opt out of seeing advertisements, but that’s wishful thinking. We’ll just have to make do with installing an ad blocker on our browser. 

Speaking of which, be sure to check out TechRadar’s list of the best ad blockers for 2023. 

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

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WhatsApp just made transferring chat history so easy but there may be one big limit
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WhatsApp is making it easier to transfer chat logs from your old phone to a new one just by scanning a QR code.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the initial announcement on his Instagram channel where he states this method lets you move your data privately without ever having to leave your devices.” Looking at the video he posted, you first open up the QR code on the older device, then scan said code on the newer phone. Give it about 10 seconds to finish up and you’re done. Other reports state the Chat Transfer tool can be found under the Chats section in the Settings menu.

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Compared to the old method of having to back up your history on either Google Drive or iCloud, this is a lot more straightforward. You’re effectively cutting out the middleman plus you don’t have to worry about hitting storage limits if your WhatsApp account has several gigabytes worth of media saved on it.

As great as this new feature may be, it appears there is a catch. TheVerge claims the QR code chat log transfer “only works between devices running the same operating system, so Android to Android or iOS to iOS.” If you want to move your data from, say, a Samsung Galaxy phone to an iPhone or vice versa, you’ll have to head over to WhatsApp’s Help Center for instructions on how to do so.

We asked Meta to confirm if this is true. We’ll update this story at a later time.

Availability

Meta is currently rolling out the Chat Transfer tool in waves to all its users. Be sure to keep an eye out for the patch once it arrives. No word if there are plans to add a similar feature to the desktop version of WhatsApp.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because WABetaInfo first revealed the update back in early May when it was only available to beta testers. The publication has since shown off other interesting changes coming to WhatsApp. For instance, a WhatsBeta beta on Android from late May introduces screen-sharing for video calls, which you can activate right after installation and try out with others. There are also plans to introduce multi-account support to the platform giving people a way to swap between profiles on the same smartphone.

While we have you, be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the best secure smartphones for June 2023.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

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Is this the hardest week in Wordle history?
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As usual, we're going to be spoiling today's Wordle answer if you read on – so make sure you've solved it first before scrolling on.

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history? If you look at Google Trends this week, with people searching for the Wordle answer, you might think that it's been almost impossibly difficult:

Today's trends data on white background

WATCH, CATER and MOVIE have all seen huge spikes of interest in the Wordle answer. (Image credit: TechRadar / Google)

If you followed that graph, and looked at the trending Twitter terms, you'd easily surmise that the WATCH, the answer last Friday, and CATER yesterday were the worst offenders – along with the tricky solution of MOVIE today.

But we spoke to Shaun Savage, editor in chief of Try Hard Guides, a site with its own dedicated Wordle solver pages, and he gave some surprising statistics:

“Today's word [MOVIE] is definitely giving people some challenge. By and far, 56% of people have figured out that the word ends in 'IE' but are struggling to think of words that fit. 

“Following that, about 15% of people have figured out there's at least an O in the word. It seems like the “V” is the most difficult letter to determine! 

“We aren't even seeing too many people looking for “OVIE” or “MO_IE,” so it seems many are getting 2-3 letters but getting four is a struggle.

“Our page on '5 letter words' ending in IE' was the most trafficked post this morning – a lot of people like to get ideas but, perhaps, not just get to the answer immediately, so these types of posts help clear away some fog.”

So it's clear that today's Wordle was, perhaps, one of the hardest in a while, even if it's not had the same number of players desperately searching for the answer online.

But what about the last seven days as a whole?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

Wordle guess rages

(Image credit: New York Times)

With three words this week that trended massively on Twitter (and saw massive spikes in traffic to our Wordle hints and answer page), does that mean this has been the hardest time for Wordle users yet… especially against the backdrop of accusations against NY Times making the game easier?

And while it has been a very difficult week, it appears that people are searching for Wordle answers for different reasons this week – rhyming words mean people can get to their final guess with no obvious answer:

“From our data, this week has been harder than the earlier weeks in March, though, with a good mix of reasons. _ATCH just had a lot of options and people quickly maxed out on guesses,” added Savage.

“Words like TODAY, FOCUS and SMELT all had slightly less popular letters in them; SMELT is also not a commonly used word so the 'SM' and 'LT' combinations may have been tricky.

“CATER was the same way; common letters, so many quickly found as possibilities but lots of options. MOVIE has three vowels and contains two lesser-used consonants (M and V).”

A better week ahead

It's good to hear that things have been tricky this week – we at TechRadar have had such a tough week that we've even run live blogs on the hardest puzzles to allow readers to air their thoughts on the difficulty.

We also spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK’s University of Warwick, previously to find out why CATER was such a tough word:

“Looking back at Project Gutenberg's list of common n-grams,” Dr Voice tells us, “you can really see why getting some of [the] letters in place isn't necessarily narrowing down the possibilities. ER is the fourth most common combination of any two letters in the whole of the English language, it seems, and TER the twelfth most common combination of three.

“That said,” he adds, “I also think it's interesting to think about why 'CATER' might not seem like an immediately obvious option to everyone who's got the point of finding _ATER. The answer to this might be to do with our expectations about morphology – the way we combine together different parts of language to make new words.”

So, while it's impossible to put a full and defined metric against the difficulty of words in the current Wordle games, it seems that this week has certainly been full of a few pitfalls.

And if you're getting tired of Wordle, then try Scholardle– it's Wordle if you want to make things a lot harder.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

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Is this the hardest week in Wordle history?
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As usual, we're going to be spoiling today's Wordle answer if you read on – so make sure you've solved it first before scrolling on.

Is this the hardest week in Wordle history? If you look at Google Trends this week, with people searching for the Wordle answer, you might think that it's been almost impossibly difficult:

Today's trends data on white background

WATCH, CATER and MOVIE have all seen huge spikes of interest in the Wordle answer. (Image credit: TechRadar / Google)

If you followed that graph, and looked at the trending Twitter terms, you'd easily surmise that the WATCH, the answer last Friday, and CATER yesterday were the worst offenders – along with the tricky solution of MOVIE today.

But we spoke to Shaun Savage, editor in chief of Try Hard Guides, a site with its own dedicated Wordle solver pages, and he gave some surprising statistics:

“Today's word [MOVIE] is definitely giving people some challenge. By and far, 56% of people have figured out that the word ends in 'IE' but are struggling to think of words that fit. 

“Following that, about 15% of people have figured out there's at least an O in the word. It seems like the “V” is the most difficult letter to determine! 

“We aren't even seeing too many people looking for “OVIE” or “MO_IE,” so it seems many are getting 2-3 letters but getting four is a struggle.

“Our page on '5 letter words' ending in IE' was the most trafficked post this morning – a lot of people like to get ideas but, perhaps, not just get to the answer immediately, so these types of posts help clear away some fog.”

So it's clear that today's Wordle was, perhaps, one of the hardest in a while, even if it's not had the same number of players desperately searching for the answer online.

But what about the last seven days as a whole?

The hardest Wordle week ever?

Wordle guess rages

(Image credit: New York Times)

With three words this week that trended massively on Twitter (and saw massive spikes in traffic to our Wordle hints and answer page), does that mean this has been the hardest time for Wordle users yet… especially against the backdrop of accusations against NY Times making the game easier?

And while it has been a very difficult week, it appears that people are searching for Wordle answers for different reasons this week – rhyming words mean people can get to their final guess with no obvious answer:

“From our data, this week has been harder than the earlier weeks in March, though, with a good mix of reasons. _ATCH just had a lot of options and people quickly maxed out on guesses,” added Savage.

“Words like TODAY, FOCUS and SMELT all had slightly less popular letters in them; SMELT is also not a commonly used word so the 'SM' and 'LT' combinations may have been tricky.

“CATER was the same way; common letters, so many quickly found as possibilities but lots of options. MOVIE has three vowels and contains two lesser-used consonants (M and V).”

A better week ahead

It's good to hear that things have been tricky this week – we at TechRadar have had such a tough week that we've even run live blogs on the hardest puzzles to allow readers to air their thoughts on the difficulty.

We also spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK’s University of Warwick, previously to find out why CATER was such a tough word:

“Looking back at Project Gutenberg's list of common n-grams,” Dr Voice tells us, “you can really see why getting some of [the] letters in place isn't necessarily narrowing down the possibilities. ER is the fourth most common combination of any two letters in the whole of the English language, it seems, and TER the twelfth most common combination of three.

“That said,” he adds, “I also think it's interesting to think about why 'CATER' might not seem like an immediately obvious option to everyone who's got the point of finding _ATER. The answer to this might be to do with our expectations about morphology – the way we combine together different parts of language to make new words.”

So, while it's impossible to put a full and defined metric against the difficulty of words in the current Wordle games, it seems that this week has certainly been full of a few pitfalls.

And if you're getting tired of Wordle, then try Scholardle– it's Wordle if you want to make things a lot harder.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

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Google Chrome update makes searching your history less of a nightmare
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Google is reportedly testing out a new feature for its browser that will make searching through your browsing history and bookmarks even easier in Chrome.

First spotted by Chrome Story, the search giant has added a new experimental flag to Chrome's omnibox that enables support for search keywords.

For those unfamiliar, Chrome's omnibox suggests potential queries when the “Autocomplete searches and URLs” feature is turned on in the browser's settings. This makes searching for information faster and easier as users don't have to type in an entire search query into the address bar to find exactly what they're looking for.

Search tags

The new experimental flag in question is called “Omnibox Site Search Starter Pack” and it enables @history, @bookmarks and @settings to be used as search tags when typing in Chrome's address bar.

By using these tags when searching in Google's browser, you'll be able to specify that you only want to search in your history, bookmarks or in Chrome's settings. 

For instance, let's say you were reading a news article about Chromebooks on your smartphone but had to stop and do something else. If you want to find it again later, you can simply type Chromebooks @history to quickly bring up the article and continue reading.

According to Chrome Story, this new feature hasn't yet been enabled in the latest Chrome beta or Canary releases, so it might be a while before you get to try it out for yourself. Still though, search tags in Chrome's omnibox will not only help users save time but it may even make them more productive.

We've also featured the best browser and best VPN

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