All posts tagged: search

Drug Sites Hijacked Spotify’s Search Ranking Through Fake Podcasts, Report Finds

Drug Sites Hijacked Spotify’s Search Ranking Through Fake Podcasts, Report Finds

Published by skeptic

For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription. Nevertheless, the report frames the cleanup as a moderation failure. The report leans on one comparison in particular: Spotify acted against more than 3,500 accounts for drug content in 2025 but fewer than 100 the year before. The committee presents the jump as evidence the company moved only after it came under scrutiny. Spotify offered a different explanation: that its older counts are incomplete because, as it says in the report, …

I replaced Windows Search with a free tool and my files are now instant to find

I replaced Windows Search with a free tool and my files are now instant to find

Published by skeptic

It is very common to have to stare at a motionless loading bar while your computer fans spin out of control. The default Windows search tool is supposed to help you manage your documents, but it crawls to a halt while choking on its own massive database. While there are some fixes, the links and files generally disappear into a black hole, search results miss exact filename matches, and the constant background indexing slows your entire system. However, there is an alternative that is fast and easy on your machine that you likely won’t want to get rid of. Related I ditched Windows Search for this free app and it’s amazing Searching has never been this fast or this satisfying. Windows Search is pretty limited It’s so bad at its job way too often Jorge Aguilar / MakeUseOf Windows Search works differently under the hood than you’re probably used to. Instead of just mapping where your files sit on disk, the search crawls your entire directory tree and digs into the contents of your files. …

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

Published by Sam Flores

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify. If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings. For the quarter century that Google has been the de facto front door to the web, businesses have tried to find …

10 big questions about the search for life beyond Earth

10 big questions about the search for life beyond Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

In our quest to understand what’s out there in the Universe, one cosmic unknown looms larger than all the rest: are there other examples of life, complex life, intelligent life, and technologically advanced life out there beyond planet Earth? And if there are other examples out there, a slew of follow-up questions seem inevitable. How common, uncommon, or rare are those types of life? Are there other technologically advanced, or even spacefaring, civilizations out there, perhaps even within our own Milky Way? Where, and under what conditions, have other forms of life arisen? Are the chemical and biological pathways that life took on Earth universal, and if not, what are the variations that are out there? And is life on Earth the pinnacle of what life in the Universe can become, or are there even grander examples of biological (or technological) success out there, perhaps for us to learn from as well? It was only a short while ago that I took stock of where we are today — and where we’d like to go …

Researchers trained an open source AI search agent, Harness-1, that outperforms GPT-5.4 on recalling relevant information

Researchers trained an open source AI search agent, Harness-1, that outperforms GPT-5.4 on recalling relevant information

Published by skeptic

A joint research collaboration between researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), UC Berkeley, and the open source AI-native vector database platform Chroma unveiled Harness-1, a 20-billion parameter open-source search agent built atop OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20B open source model that fundamentally redesigns how AI executes complex retrieval tasks. Harness-1 achieves a massive leap in performance, scoring 73% average on its ability to recall relevant information correctly from a curated dataset, outperforming even GPT-5.4 (70.9%) and the next, most accurate open source search agent, Tongyi DeepResearch 30B, by 11.4 percentage points. (While GPT-5.5 has also been out for more than a month, the researchers didn’t test against this model as it wasn’t available when they were building theirs.) Harness-1 accuracy benchmark performance compared to other leading AI search agents and models. Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UC Berkeley, Chroma Crucially for developers, the model and its environment are available immediately under the highly permissive Apache 2.0 license and model code/weights on Hugging Face. Harness-1 also serves as proof-of-efficacy of another effort, Tinker, the distributed, …

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way’s central black hole has long posed an awkward problem. By every standard picture of how black holes behave, Sagittarius A* should be blowing material back into space as it feeds. Yet for more than half a century, astronomers could not find clear evidence that it was doing so. Now they say that missing wind has finally turned up. A team at Northwestern University used years of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to build an unusually sharp map of the cold gas crowding the black hole’s neighborhood. In that map, they found a broad, cone-shaped cavity carved out of molecular gas within about one parsec, or roughly three light-years, of Sagittarius A*. The researchers argue that only a hot wind from the black hole can explain the feature. Therefore, this offers what they describe as the clearest evidence yet that the Milky Way’s central black hole is not an exception to the usual rules. The highest-resolution and most sensitive map of cold gas within ∼1 pc from …

Police search for suspects in Ohio shooting that wounded 12 near a street festival : NPR

Police search for suspects in Ohio shooting that wounded 12 near a street festival : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

The Agnes Reynolds Jackson Arboretum is shown where multiple people were shot at a community festival Saturday, June 6, 2026, in Toledo, Ohio. Paul Sancya/AP hide caption toggle caption Paul Sancya/AP Police still had no suspects in custody Sunday after a weekend shooting near an Ohio street festival wounded 12 people and sent attendees scrambling for cover in a busy Toledo neighborhood. Toledo Deputy Police Chief Joe Heffernan said it appeared that at least two people fired weapons on Saturday near the Old West End Festival and were “probably shooting at each other.” Authorities say a search for the the shooters was ongoing and had not identified any potential suspects. They urged festivalgoers to come forward with any photos or videos. “As far as violence, this is over the top, right?” Toledo police Lt. Dan Gerken said. “Twelve people being shot, that’s the most I’ve been to a scene. I’ve been to a lot of scenes, but this is way over the top.” Hundreds of people were at the festival, an annual two-day celebration in …

Google just added another layer to Search results, and we’re running out of room to scroll

Google just added another layer to Search results, and we’re running out of room to scroll

Published by skeptic

Summary Google will now insert creator profiles directly into Search results. Creator profiles add clutter, which could make Search busier and harder to scan. Google keeps piling on AI features, shifting Search from a simple list to a feature-rich hub. Google Search has changed dramatically over the past few years. What was once a relatively simple list of links is now filled with AI-generated answers, shopping recommendations, videos, discussion threads, news carousels, and other features designed to keep you engaged as you search. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Google will be adding yet another element to your Search results: creator profiles. Related I changed how I search on Google, and it actually works better now These simple search tweaks helped me get better results without ditching Google. A way for creators to showcase their work Your favorite creators directly in your search results Credit: Google According to Google, the new profile feature will allow eligible creators and publishers to highlight their work directly within Google Search results. That’s all fine and dandy for helping creators …

Beating the heat: study explores the search for cool during heatwaves | Extreme heat

Beating the heat: study explores the search for cool during heatwaves | Extreme heat

Published by Jenni Sidey

Heatwaves are now an increasingly expected part of summer for many. But how people stay cool varies from place to place. A new study uses mobile phone location data to track where people go when the mercury climbs, and assesses how we need to adapt to live better with the inevitable heatwaves to come. During the summer of 2025, a 10-day extreme period of heat across Europe led to 2,300 deaths. Globally, governments are implementing heat action plans, but social inequalities mean some people are more vulnerable to heat than others. Researchers used mobile phone location data across seven countries – Brazil, China, France, India, Nigeria, Turkey and the US – to assess how people stayed cool during heatwaves in 2022 and 2023. Not surprisingly, the results, published in Environmental Research Climate, show people tend to withdraw into their homes during heatwaves. However, places such as shopping malls and parks also became important refuges, particularly for people without air conditioning at home. In Mexico, people aged between 18 and 35 were disproportionately likely to die …