Search, Entangled

Google ties Search to AI for schools: those that disable its AI tools entirely will also lose student access to Search. After elected officials objected, Google said Search can be turned back on with AI Overviews, which keeps the choice fairly circular for schools that refuse.

Why it matters The policy shows how deeply AI is built into Google Search, leaving schools with little option to avoid it while keeping the search engine.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time returns as a Switch 2 remake, 28 years after the Nintendo 64 original, and early reviews call it a masterpiece with the heart of the 1998 game intact and controls much improved.

Canva cuts 22 percent of its staff, affecting 1,271 people through layoffs, role changes and relocations to centralised hubs. CEO Melanie Perkins called it the hardest moment in the company's thirteen-year history, as growth slowed for the first time in a decade at the Sydney firm.

Why it matters A large design-software company shrinking its workforce this sharply signals that even category leaders are feeling pressure when growth slows.

AMD posts a record quarter with $13.4 billion in revenue, and forecasts about $17 billion next quarter. Data center sales nearly doubled from a year ago, and shares rose in response to booming AI chip sales.

Poisoned cPGuard updates hit nearly 3,000 web hosting servers after attackers used compromised credentials to get into OpsShield's update servers. The company also confirmed that customer contact details were taken in the supply chain attack.

Google Search growth slows to 12 percent year over year in the third quarter, down from roughly 17 percent the quarter before, even as query volume grows at its fastest rate in five years and AI has yet to match search's earning power.

Anthropic builds FlashProve to produce a cryptographic proof that one specific model generated one specific reply. The prototype, made with collaborators at EPFL, MIT and StarkWare, has been open-sourced for mixture-of-experts models.

Why it matters Verifiable proof of which model produced an answer could matter for trust in AI outputs as people rely on them more.

Windows 11 gets faster on 8GB machines, with Microsoft claiming multitasking up to 40 percent faster and 20 percent more responsiveness, as rising RAM prices keep cheaper configurations in the market.

Reddit tests search ads that appear in results based on factors including contextual relevance, as traffic from Google declines and the company looks for ways to reach users showing high purchase intent.

ChatGPT search volume now equals roughly 20 percent of Google's, OpenAI says, a figure that suggests "Ask Chat" is increasingly standing in for Googling.

Why it matters If the figure holds, a meaningful share of web search is moving away from Google, which affects publishers and advertisers as well as the search giant.