The U.S. team did not make the World Cup final, but “The Star-Spangled Banner” apparently did. On July 14, FIFA announced that Grammy award–winning singer and talk show host Jennifer Hudson will perform a “special rendition” of the anthem before the World Cup final on Sunday, July 19, at New York New Jersey Stadium (better…
Every site you have ever optimized carries a record of that work, and it is more detailed than the platforms usually admit. Search systems have kept a per-domain profile for years, assembled from signals you know intimately because you spent a career shaping them. That profile is real, it is granular, and it never needed…
Kylie Jenner’s latest fashion campaign is selling more than a pair of sunglasses. In the ad for Meta‘s new “Kylie Edition” AI-powered glasses, Jenner moves through an unusually glamorous version of an ordinary morning. She touches up her manicure, looks through her closet, drinks green juice, and briefly inspects the work being done around her…
Close to a year after the enactment of the UK’s age assurance law, the Online Safety Act, Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has released a report on its progress. The Online Safety Act requires robust age checks for sites that have content “restricted to adults,” which extends from pornography to non-explicit content like the r/stopsmoking…
The UK government announced plans to establish a social media curfew for teens aged 16 and 17, the BBC reported. The news comes a month after the UK announced a ban on social media for children under 16, and days after the EU announced a similar ban for children under 13. The curfew would restrict…
Thanks to Rand’s excellent research and Barry’s expletive-laden ranting, we know that Google processes over 5 trillion searches each year. Trillion. Per day, that’s 13.7 billion. Per second, 158,000. There are some sizeable and growing caveats here: That still means Google processes 2.92 billion clicks to the open web every day. It’s still a figure…
Rappers are known to exaggerate for street cred. Mostly to create an aura of either authenticity or mythos to get fans to buy in. It’s the nature of the game. But there’s exaggerating, and then there’s just lying. A viral clip of one particularly outrageous lie is making the rounds again, three years later. It’s…
X is rolling out a small but notable change to how it surfaces content from people users follow back, according to a post from the platform’s head of product, Nikita Bier. In a message published Monday, Bier said the company identified a gap in how the algorithm weighted relationships between users. “We’re rolling out a…
Google is adding AI image generation to AI Overviews and redesigning the Google Images homepage to mark the service’s 25th anniversary. Brad Kellet, Senior Engineering Director for Search, announced the changes in a company blog post. Image Generation In AI Overviews Image generation inside AI Overviews turns a text prompt into a custom image built…
One of the AI concepts currently reshaping the digital marketing industry is agentic commerce. It’s similar to the shift we’ve lived through in search over the past four years, where AI has reduced the friction needed to find things. Search used to mean digging through 10 blue links to assemble your own answer. Now you…