The AI search tools are getting better — but they don’t yet understand what a search engine really is and how we really use them.
The head of Threads and Mastodon competitor Bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-Twitter internet.
I spent a little bit today fiddling with this playground for open-source diagram scripting language D2 (not to be confused with the system programming language D, Dreamcast survival horror game D2, or data visualization library D3).
It’s not a programming game like, say, Swift Playgrounds, but it offers some of the same easy satisfaction of entering text and seeing an immediate result.
[D2 Playground]
this is an experience on a “subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the U.S.,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.
Last year, we wrote about the AI takeover of Google Search and how Google wants you to forget the 10 blue links — but back then, it was opt-in. Just this week, Google’s head of AI search became the company’s head of search, period.
[Search Engine Land]
The leader of design toolmaker Figma on life after the failed Adobe deal and what comes next in a live interview from SXSW.
You may find that your Google Drive account has Dark mode on the web now — I have it on just one of mine, so far.
If Google has blessed you with the update, you’ll get a “New! Dark mode” prompt at login. After, the option lives under the gear icon > Settings > General > Appearance. Check the gallery below for more.
Screenshots posted by App researcher Nima Owji show that LinkedIn is testing games, with companies ranked on how well their employees do. TechCrunch published some official screenshots supplied by LinkedIn, which confirmed the games.
Pour one out for the first team that gets berated by their boss over their company’s Crossclimb score.
The Twitter/X alternative’s latest financial update is dire: it may run out of money in April after losing contact with a single person who’s provided its funding so far. While the operators lay out backup plans like crowdfunding, the site’s future seems uncertain to say the least.
[cohost dot org on cohost]
Search VP Pandu Nayak told me the other day Google is dead serious about enforcing its policies against content designed to game search results. Looks like that’s already happening:
Many SEOs and site owners are saying their sites are no longer showing in the Google Search index, even for a site command, after receiving the manual actions.
Google helped make the web a mess. Now it has to fix it.
[Search Engine Roundtable]
Pornhub and Xvideos, two porn sites designated as “very large online platforms” last December, are challenging their Digital Services Act obligations, Politico reports. Pornhub isn’t happy about its VLOP status, and it and Xvideos are asking for a pause on rules requiring them to publish a library of the ads on their services. The DSA is focused on content moderation, and fighting illegal and harmful content.
On this special episode of Decoder, Complexly co-founder and YouTuber Hank Green turns the tables on Nilay Patel.
AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.
It’s not easy to calculate the watts and joules that go into a single Balenciaga pope. But we’re not completely in the dark about the true energy cost of AI.
The Washington Post reports that Truth Social has the Securities and Exchange Commission’s go-ahead to complete its SPAC merger, taking the company public and unlocking around $300 million after years of uncertainty. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of drama:
A federal prosecution of three early Digital World investors, who investigators said made tens of millions of dollars in insider trades related to the merger deal, is also scheduled to go to trial in April. In a superseding indictment filed last week in federal court, prosecutors added a charge of money laundering to one investor, Michael Shvartsman, saying he used some of his profits to buy a $14 million luxury yacht he later renamed “Provocateur.”
[The Washington Post]
Thanks to AI, rote tasks are ripe for automation. But is that really a good thing?
Six months after kicking off an initial Mastodon trial that saw it launch its own instance on the federated platform, the UK’s public broadcaster is not just extending the experiment by another six months, it’s also “planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub.”
It feels like a promising sign for the future of the fediverse.
Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?
For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
