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AI news about AI search and its effect on the web.

8 stories in the last 3 days

Today

1 story
  1. Worth knowing The Verge

    Google hasn’t figured out how to make AI pay like its search engine

    It highlights the ongoing financial challenge tech giants face in monetizing AI features enough to justify massive capital expenditures on AI infrastructure.

    Alphabet's third-quarter earnings showed Google Search revenue growth slowing to 12 percent and paid click growth dropping to 8 percent, even as search queries rose at their fastest rate in five years. Following the report, Alphabet shares fell about 14 percent amid investor concern over the company's plans to spend roughly $200 billion on AI-focused infrastructure this year.

    1 source

Yesterday

4 stories
  1. Worth knowing TechCrunch

    Netflix’s new AI Discover tab helps you find something to watch based on your mood

    It shows how major consumer platforms are integrating real-time AI personalization to move beyond static recommendation algorithms.

    Netflix is rolling out a new "AI Discover" tab for U.S. TV users to test experimental content discovery features. The initial feature uses a real-time learning intelligence layer to recommend shows and movies based on user-selected moods, available time, and preferences.

    2 sources
  2. Worth knowing The Verge

    OpenAI says ChatGPT is catching up to Google in search

    Reaching a fifth of Google's search volume suggests AI chatbots are meaningfully changing how consumers look for information online and posing a growing challenge to traditional search engines.

    OpenAI announced that the volume of search queries run through ChatGPT has reached 20 percent of the volume run through Google. Consumer product lead Adam Fry clarified that OpenAI defines a search as any user query that triggers a web search, though he did not specify the source for Google's numbers.

    1 source
  3. Worth knowing Hacker News

    Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI

    Bundling AI features directly with core search access forces educational institutions to either adopt AI or lose a fundamental tool, highlighting how major tech companies can mandate AI adoption.

    A New York Times report states that Google plans to turn off its search service for schools that choose to reject AI features. The post links to the news article and a Google blog post regarding education products, though no additional details are provided in the text.

    5 sources
  4. Worth knowing Wired

    Here's Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Vote

    As voters increasingly turn to consumer AI chatbots for election information, persistent hallucinations and reliance on partisan sources highlight ongoing reliability and misinformation challenges for leading AI models.

    Ahead of the US midterm elections, studies by Forum AI and NewsGuard reveal that mainstream AI chatbots frequently provide inaccurate voting information and cite partisan "pink slime" websites. Nearly 40 percent of election-related answers from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini contained factual errors, while ChatGPT cited partisan sites masquerading as news in over 70 percent of tested searches.

    1 source

Mon, Nov 2

3 stories
  1. Worth knowing TechCrunch

    New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping

    The lawsuits expand AI copyright litigation beyond model developers and search engines to target the third-party data suppliers and web indexes that feed the AI ecosystem.

    The New York Times and several other newspapers have filed federal lawsuits against web browser company Brave, alleging it scraped their copyrighted content using an unidentified crawler. The publishers claim Brave acted as a distributor of stolen data by selling the scraped articles to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

    2 sources
  2. Worth knowing MIT Technology Review

    The agentic web is here

    The shift toward autonomous agents browsing and transacting online is reshaping web design, online business models, and cybersecurity as AI becomes a primary user of the internet.

    Autonomous AI agents capable of browsing and interacting with the internet are transforming the human-centric web into an "agentic web." While some companies build specialized connectors and agent-targeted ads to accommodate these tools, others block external agents as models grow increasingly adept at navigating graphical interfaces and acting independently.

    1 source
  3. Worth knowing Hacker News

    AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

    This highlights the dual threat generative AI poses to the open web, as automated content farms degrade search quality while aggressive data scrapers drive up hosting costs for human-maintained community resources.

    AI-generated gaming wikis filled with fabricated and irrelevant information are flooding search engine results, particularly targeting smaller indie games to capture ad traffic or spread malware. Simultaneously, legitimate volunteer-run wikis are struggling with soaring server costs caused by aggressive scraping from AI crawlers like Meta's.

    1 source

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