Travel brands should ensure they consider the search "intent" of prospective customers when optimising their pages, as Google turns more to advanced tech to serve results. With the search giant's increased use of machine learning and sophisticated artificial intelligences techniques to display results, smaller travel brands in particular must understand how a subtle shift is taking place in how SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) are served. Larger travel companies, Searchmetrics argues, have an advantage as Google appears to rank them higher for content than similar items from lower-profile brands. Google is looking to understand the "real intention" behind words used by consumers, in a bid to make results more relevant, says Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics CTO and founder. "With the help of user signals, such as how often certain results are clicked and how long people spend there, the search engine gets a sense of how well searchers' questions are answered; allowing it to continually refine and improve relevance. "A searcher who types'things to remember for my beach holiday' into the search box is most likely looking for a short list for example; someone who types'height Mont Blanc' wants a single piece of information, while a query like'nice beach mallorca' is most likely wanting a series of images and a'how to pack a suitcase' query might be best served with video content." Interestingly, word count on content is beginning to become a determininh factor of the placement of sites in search results. This, according to Searchmetrics, is due to top performing results generally more detailed, cover more aspects of a topic (destination, for example). The number of keywords, however, is no longer as important as previously thought of, Tober argues. "Google is no longer just trying to reward pages that use more matching keywords with higher rankings; it is trying to interpret the search intention and boosting the content that is most relevant to the query." Finally, backlinks are also becoming less important to achieve a high ranking in SERPS. It remains a "strong correlation", Tober says, but things have changed, not least because mobile searches are now so popular and, generally, pages are more often than not "shared" or "liked", rather than linked to. "Google's application of machine learning to evaluate search queries and web content means that the factors it uses to determine search rankings are changing all the time.

U.S. drone strikes against suspected al-Qaida targets have been commonplace in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, as a retaliatory measure against the group. The use of unmanned aircraft as well as air strikes in the Arab world's poorest country rose dramatically under President Barack Obama, with data from the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism showing spikes in attacks, especially in 2012 and 2016.

In billiards, you must call your shot ahead of time. You don't get any points for luck. With that in mind, here are my on-the-record predictions for 2017. Self-driving cars, previously existing only in the world of science fiction, are becoming a reality. Today taxis are driving themselves in Singapore.

BY PATRICK WATSON: The news headlines after last week's jobs report proved it again: Life is hard (and getting harder) for low-skilled workers. Illegal immigrants take their service industry jobs. Robots take their manufacturing industry jobs. According to the media, many low-skilled workers have simply given up. Their lives are terrible, and everyone wants to help.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, 'Let us replace you'." Microsoft is striving to give technology human intelligence and capabilities, but CEO Satya Nadella says it and its rivals should divert efforts away from AI that replaces people. Nadella will join a chorus of tech leaders at this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, addressing concerns that the current war for AI talent being waged by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook will lead to machines that replace, rather than help humans. Don't worry, robots and AI won't take your job: Well, at least not all of it Automation probably won't lead to massive unemployment, but governments will still need to prepare for major upheaval, according to a new study. Nadella says he's warned Microsoft and its rivals to steer clear of "parlor tricks" that show AI's power without preserving workers' dignity.

The insurance sector is one of the most old-fashioned and resistant to change -- so artificial intelligence will have an even greater effect. The insurance sector is one of the most old-fashioned and resistant-to-change space, and this is why AI will have a greater impact on that with respect to more receptive industries. The collection of data of new types (i.e., unstructured data such as reports, images, contracts, etc.) and the use of new algorithms are disrupting the sector in several ways. This is a really simplistic representation of the insurance business in the last fifty years, and I am aware that insurance experts might disagree with me in many different ways. There are a couple of further features to be pointed out: first of all, insurance has historically been sold not bought, which means that brokers and agents were essential to tracking new customers and to even retain old ones. In addition, it is an industry which is by definition rich of data because they collected anything they could, but is also one of the less advanced because either many of those data are unstructured or semi-structured, or the model used are quite old and simple.

Cyrus Radfar is a founding engineer of AddThis, which was acquired by Oracle. Mankind has a complex relationship with the notion of Artificial Intelligence. Tinged with both fear and fascination; the timeline for AI development is punctuated by cultural and historical events that have brought with them new speculation and theories. Mechanical men and artificial beings were a prevalent feature of Greek myth, including the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein introduced generations of readers to a terrifying idea of non-human intelligence; and, in more recent times, the dialogue has included the idea of computerized tech becoming a threat to the existence of our species. These recent concerns culminated in the 2015 "Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence", signed by over 150 people including Professor Stephen Hawking, and have been perpetuated by Elon Musk's occasional ominous remarks.

Amazon and Google always thrive in the fourth quarter as people get out their wallets for Christmas. Both companies – or in Google's case, its parent group, Alphabet – are therefore expected to announce booming revenues in their fourth-quarter results over the next fortnight, with Alphabet going first on Thursday and Amazon the following week. But analysts are already looking beyond the simple question of how many cardboard boxes Amazon filled and how many searches Google answered. They're wondering which company will win the battle to control your home. That battle is being fought by two carafe-sized cylinders from the respective companies.

The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous Insurtech startups--around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map--have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last years from insurance companies. I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I'm convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.

Many technology commentators got all excited a few months ago when Microsoft launched how-old.net, a website where users could upload a photo and the site would guess the age of the person in the picture. The service was a great way to showcase the opportunity that applying artificial intelligence to a problem set introduces. Insilico hopes to deliver a similar sort of an offering, but with a far more important purpose. Insilico Medicine is an organization focused on aging research. Headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, it has R&D resources in Belgium, Poland, Russia and China employing 39 scientists worldwide.