Google wraps up a rocky month of news with this innocuous pop quiz

Summary

• Google put out a pop quiz on its blog today that, while innocent enough, avoids addressing recent controversial issues.
• Today’s quiz highlights positive stories, including a Doodle student challenge, but excludes major events such as AI Overviews.
• Google’s attempt to divert attention with a quiz designed for those in the know may backfire, drawing more focus to its missing negative news.

There’s a lot going on in the world of tech right now. There’s a surprise new Samsung wearable of, well, questionable value. Microsoft and Qualcomm are just days away from finally launching us into the era of ARM-powered Windows PCs. And, lest we forget, the dawn of Apple Intelligence is upon us, what with its ChatGPT integration and questionable image generation. But it was Google that kicked off this news cycle just a month ago, and to make sure you don’t forget, it’s delivering what all cool companies can only dream of: a quiz.

Although we’re expecting a new Android 15 beta at any moment, today’s big blog post from Google isn’t detailing changes to our favorite operating system or issuing another strong defense of AI Overviews. Instead, we’ve got our hands on a quiz all about the last month’s worth of news out of Mountain View, and you can practically feel the efforts being made to not make AI the center of every question.

Seven questions, all multiple choice, make up a news recap of everything since I/O. On its face, it might sound easy for Android Police readers, but some of these questions pull from some niche announcements, like student Doodle competitions and YouTube ad presentations. It’s surprisingly difficult if you aren’t, I don’t know, working somewhere within the Googleplex this very moment.

I won’t spoil the results of the quiz — though I will tell you, you don’t get anything for getting all seven questions right, so don’t beat yourself up if you’ve already forgotten where Google Wallet launched last month.

A silly blog post hides a bad month’s worth of news for Google

Look, on its face, I think this is a pretty innocent blog post meant to round up the most positive news stories surrounding Google at the moment. I also, however, think it’s bizarre that Gemini is mentioned just once in this quiz, purely in relation to how many times the company said “AI” during its I/O keynote. And considering Google has only done something like this once before — in celebration of its 25th anniversary last September — it does feel designed to paper over some of the less favorable news stories of the last month.

AI Overviews, for example, are absolutely nowhere to be seen in here, despite Liz Reid, VP and head of Search, shouting about its successes from the rooftops just a couple of weeks ago. Google’s reinvention of its search engine continues to be one of the biggest stories in tech, but you wouldn’t know that from this quiz. We also saw several internal documents leak out into the public, breaking down everything from some seriously questionable privacy breaches to some clues surrounding how sites are ranked on search. There’s obviously no reason for Google to include these stories in a self-published exam, but if you’re in the know, it does draw a big, red circle around these missing events.

Put simply, it’s been a bad month for Google. Disguising it with an otherwise innocuous quiz about the Pixel 8a’s limited-edition Aloe color — which, to be fully transparent, I’m not sure I ever realized was limited-edition to begin with — just brings more attention to the missing stories not included in this roundup. As we enter the back half of the year, let’s hope the company’s future news cycles are a bit more positive than what this quiz demonstrates. Maybe some new Pixel hardware will bring along the change of pace Google needs.