It’s been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield … Read more
AI agents are everywhere. Every briefing I’ve attended for software companies over the past year has involved some mention of agents—using generative AI tools to automate digital tasks. Despite breakout moments at the start of 2026, like the plucky OpenClaw agent that early adopters used to manage their online life, most people are not yet … Read more
Much weirder is voice editing in Google Docs, in a new feature called Docs Live. By describing with your voice what you want to write, an agent will dictate your words, generate text, pull in citations from the web, and aim to turn your stream-of-consciousness wishes into a coherent document. (Reminder: All this stuff may … Read more
You’ll never have to worry about the dozens of tabs open on your desktop again. In fact, you’ll never even have to leave AI Mode, Google’s chatbot-style search tool, at all. That’s the idea behind Google Chrome’s latest update. Starting today in the US, if you click a hyperlink in AI Mode on the desktop … Read more
Google seems to Have a Google addiction. If you click on a hyperlink in Google’s chatbot-style search tool, AI Mode, you are likely to be looped into another Google search, according to a new study from SE Rankinga search engine optimization company. Currently, Google.com is the most commonly linked site in AI Mode. Many website … Read more
Going online in 2026 means subjecting yourself to a relentless bombardment of generative AI tools. How about a few AI agents to get you started? Do you want to use this chatbot sidebar? Would you like every search query to be answered with an AI summary? While there is no off switch to avoid this … Read more
Perplexity is abandoning plans to put ads in its AI search product as the industry looks for sustainable business models that won’t hurt user trust. The changes are part of a larger strategic shift for the company, which has long focused on disrupting Google Search’s business. “Google is changing to be like Perplexity more than … Read more
These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We’ve written … Read more
The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw—formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot—is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots. A new report measuring bot activity on the web, … Read more