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I would like to make an amendment to an article I published last month comparing the risks of popular U.S. technology companies with concerns previously reserved for those from China. I wrote: In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U....

Om Malik: What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs. I remember when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first articulated their visio...

Simon Sharwood, the Register: Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing. Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a techn...

From a letter (PDF) sent by five U.S. lawmakers, linked from a press release issued by Sen. Ron Wyden: The U.K.’s attempted gag has already restricted U.S. companies from engaging in speech that is constitutionally protected under U.S. law and necessary for ongoing Congressional oversight. Apple has...

Josh Sisco and Davey Alba, Bloomberg, earlier this week: Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions. […] Google’s argume...

Luke Goldstein, the Lever: If you’re in one of the 9 million organizations that use Google Workspace, your company likely just received notice that it’ll have to fork over a lot more cash to use its ubiquitous office applications.The monthly price for business plans is jumping 16 percent, from $14.4...

Adam Engst, riffing for TidBits on my confused reaction to recent breakthroughs from Google and Microsoft: Perhaps it was inevitable. Companies like Microsoft and Google invest billions of dollars in fundamental research (which is good!), but their marketing departments (whom I suspect don’t underst...

Remember when new technology felt stagnant? All the stuff we use — laptops, smartphones, watches, headphones — coalesced around a similar design language. Everything became iterative or, in more euphemistic terms, mature. Attempts to find a new thing to excite people mostly failed. Remember how ever...

Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, of Wired, published a look at how third-party lists uploaded to Google DV360 allow targeting based on factors Google says its policies prohibit. It is more-or-less a story of Google’s failure to adequately moderate its platform, but it is vile to learn the kinds of s...

Imran Rahman-Jones, BBC News: However the company [Google] had previously come out strongly against this kind of data collection, saying in a 2019 blog that fingerprinting “subverts user choice and is wrong.” But in a post announcing the new rule changes, Google said the way people used the internet...

Jeff Johnson: To use Kagi as your default search engine in Safari, you have to install Kagi’s Safari extension. So I installed the extension and entered a search in the Safari address bar. Note below how Safari says “Search Google” and “Google Search”, even though I’m supposed to be using Kagi. […] ...

“Tim”: Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even without developers` knowledge. I looked into the list (link here) and ...

Emily Mae Czachor, CBS News: Google Maps users in the United States can expect to see the body of water known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico renamed the Gulf of America, aligning with the terms of President Trump’s controversial executive order. Google also said Denali, a mountain in southern A...

Katie Mcque, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien Du Plessis, Rest of World: Brazil’s AI bill is one window into a global effort to define the role that artificial intelligence will play in democratic societies. Large Silicon Valley companies involved in AI software — including Google, Micr...

Charitably, the best you can say about Tim Cook’s appearance at the inauguration this week is to presume he is there reluctantly. A million-dollar contribution bought him the same proximity to this nakedly transactional administration as executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, and Uber. It is not his ...

Mat Duggan: Last week I awoke to Google deciding I hadn’t had enough AI shoved down my throat. With no warning they decided to take the previously $20/user/month Gemini add-on and make it “free” and on by default. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also decided to remove my ability as an admin to turn ...

Tara Deschamps, Canadian Press: The Online News Act aims to level the playing field by extracting compensation from search engine and social media companies with a total annual global revenue of $1 billion or more and 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or average monthly act...

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable: Google launched a new feature in the Google App for iOS named Page Annotation. When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can “extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line.” When you click on them, G...

Competition Bureau Canada: The Competition Bureau is taking legal action against Google for anti-competitive conduct in online advertising technology services in Canada. Following a thorough investigation, the Bureau has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal that seeks to remedy the con...

Michael Kan, PC Magazine: Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-par...

Peter Kafka, Business Insider: Titled “Operation Black Walnut,” the 2022 report appears to have been assembled by Google strategists to try to imagine what kind of ad business Apple might eventually build out one day. Apple’s current ad business is mostly confined to selling ads on its App Store sea...

Ben Wallace: While Send to YouTube can be thoroughly analyzed as a milestone on the “frenemy” timeline between Apple and Google, I want to explore a pleasant consequence of this moment. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a uni...

Ahmad Alfy: My first encounter with text fragments was through links generated by Google Search results. Initially, I assumed it was a Chrome-specific feature and not part of a broader web standard. However, I soon realized that this functionality was actually built upon the open web, available to a...

Akshat Rathi, Bloomberg, in July: The Alphabet Inc. unit [Google] has claimed that it’s been carbon neutral in its operations since 2007. The status was based on purchasing carbon offsets to match the volume of emissions that were generated from its buildings, data centers and business travel. But i...

Google, fresh from being found to have an illegal monopoly in search, is now facing another trial over its dominance in internet advertising. Jody Godoy, Reuters: Prosecutors say Google has largely dominated the technological infrastructure that funds the flow of news and information on websites thr...

Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The chats show 22 instances in which one Google employee told another Google employee to turn chat history off. In total, the court has dozens of specific employees who have told others to turn history off in DMs or broader group chats and channels. The document includes ex...

Joseph Cox, 404 Media: Media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners, according to a CMG presentation obtained by 404 Media. The deck sa...

Reed Albergotti, Semafor: Google’s Android phones are about to get an AI upgrade. The company’s flagship AI model, Gemini, will replace Google Assistant as the default service on Android phones in the coming weeks, the company announced Tuesday. Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal: When I asked it to ...

Julia Love and Davey Alba, Bloomberg: Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Googl...

Alfonso Maruccia, TechSpot: Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox ins...

Since owners of web properties became aware of the traffic-sending power of search engines — most often Google in most places — they have been in an increasingly uncomfortable relationship as search moves beyond ten relevant links on a page. Google does not need websites, per se; it needs the inform...

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search the web. “Google is ...

Mark Bergen and Dawn Chmielewski, reporting for Vox — or perhaps Recode — in June 2016: The latest charge comes from SourceFed, a stray pop culture web and video site. It uploaded a short YouTube video on Thursday charging Google with deliberately altering search recommendations — through its functi...

Anthony Chavez, of Google: […] Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulato...

Thomas Claburn, the Register: Google promotes its reCAPTCHA service as a security mechanism for websites, but researchers affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, argue it’s harvesting information while extracting human labor worth billions. […] “Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consume...

Ryan Broderick: You’ve probably seen the phrase AI slop already, the term most people have settled on for the confusing and oftentimes disturbing pictures of Jesus and flight attendants and veterans that are filling up Facebook right now. But the current universe of slop is much more vast than that....

Chris Riley, of the Data Transfer Initiative: Beginning today, Apple and Google are expanding on their direct data transfer offerings to allow users of Google Photos to transfer their collections directly to iCloud Photos. This complements and completes the existing transfers that were first made po...

Cristina Criddle, Financial Times: Artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate politicians and celebrities are far more prevalent than efforts to use AI to assist cyber attacks, according to the first research by Google’s DeepMind division into the most common malicious uses of th...

Yesterday, in responding to a Google profile of DRAGONBRIDGE, a Chinese state-affiliated disinformation campaign, I wrote that I hoped Google would do the same if it were a U.S.-allied effort it had found instead — forgetting that Google had already done so, and in a far more complicated circumstanc...

Zak Butler of Google: Today we are sharing updated insights about DRAGONBRIDGE, the most prolific IO actor Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) tracks. DRAGONBRIDGE, also known as “Spamouflage Dragon,” is a spammy influence network linked to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that has a presence a...

Liz Reid, head of Google Search, on the predictably bizarre results of rolling out its “A.I. Overviews” feature: One area we identified was our ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. Let’s take a look at an example: “How many rocks should I eat?” Prior to these screenshots g...

Rand Fishkin, writing on the SparkToro blog: On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google’s Search division. The email further claimed that these leaked documents were confirmed as authentic by ex-Google emplo...

Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually...

Liz Reid, head of Google Search: People have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs. They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and are more satisfied wit...

“Gabe” on Twitter [sic]: it’s cool how every google search now starts with a wall of LLM slop that is completely useless and takes up half the screen Via Simon Willison: Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon so...

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google’s “routine, regular, and normal destruction” of evidence. ...

Waldo Jaquith: I made a new Mastodon bot, called “I Hope This Email Finds You.” Twice a day it proposes a novel way to conclude that sentence that opens so many emails. (It uses phrases from Google Books that include the phrase “finds you.”) I’ve been having fun reading these, so I turned it into […...

Ed Zitron read a bunch of the emails released in United States v. Google and believes the quality of Google’s search engine has been in decline since early 2019 thanks to new leadership: These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, ...