Google Still Doing At Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year

Company is sticking with figure it gave in 2012 but stresses it’s “over” that amount. How much over, Google’s not saying.

Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that it did give Backchannel the 2012 figure — over 100 billion per month, which Google rounds to 3 billion per day — for its story. Google told us that the figure still holds for today since “over” leaves things open-ended (and by implication, higher). Google also said not to expect an updated figure any time soon.

The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord

Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.

“They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case ..

.. “I’m not high-tech, but I’m like, ‘This isn’t that complicated. This is just some guy behind a computer,’” he recalled saying to himself. “In these technical investigations, people think they are too good to do the stupid old-school stuff. But I’m like, ‘Well, that stuff still works.’ ”

Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for material posted within specific date ranges. That brought him, during the last weekend of May 2013, to a chat room posting made just before Silk Road had gone online, in early 2011, by someone with the screen name “altoid.”

Google Cloud Vision API

Google Cloud Vision API enables developers to understand the content of an image by encapsulating powerful machine learning models in an easy to use REST API. It quickly classifies images into thousands of categories (e.g., “sailboat”, “lion”, “Eiffel Tower”), detects individual objects and faces within images, and finds and reads printed words contained within images. You can build metadata on your image catalog, moderate offensive content, or enable new marketing scenarios through image sentiment analysis.