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Tech News
Meta's advertising revenue rose 26% year-over-year to $63.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with 12% growth to $63.4 billion for Google's Search division. The 14-point gap is the widest in Meta's favor since 2021, as Meta scales AI-driven ad targeting on Facebook and Instagram while Google faces competition from chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and its own Muse.
Google Vids, a browser-based video editing tool launched for business and enterprise Workspace users in 2024, became available to individual users in 2026. The free app lets users start projects from scratch, templates, slideshows, uploaded footage, or AI-generated content using the Veo 3.1 model, and continues to receive regular updates from Google.
Android Authority outlines methods already available on most Android phones for sharing a user's real-time location with contacts, including Google Maps, Google Messages, and Find Hub. The guide walks through enabling location sharing in Google Maps via the profile menu, where users can set a time limit or share indefinitely until manually stopped.
A Google employee who built the interactive Pac-Man Google Doodle for the game's 30th anniversary in 2010 has described recreating the arcade game in HTML and CSS, including an Ms. Pac-Man easter egg and an 'Insert Coin' button replacing the I'm Feeling Lucky feature. The engineer says they relied on a small Flash component to add sound, since browsers lacked native audio support at the time, and introduced at least one unintended bug that surfaced on launch day.
Reddit's stock dropped 29.22% on Friday, its steepest single-day fall since going public in 2024, after the company reported weaker-than-expected quarterly sales growth and issued a soft sales forecast. CEO Steve Huffman said search-referral traffic from Google declined 'meaningfully' this quarter due to AI Overviews, and the company is moving toward requiring logins for previously open access.
Apple Maps has begun obscuring satellite views of several NASA and U.S. Space Force and Air Force installations, including Wallops Flight Facility, Stennis Space Center, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Vandenberg Space Force Base, and Whiteman and Ellsworth Air Force Bases. The change appeared without any Apple announcement, and coverage is inconsistent—some sensitive sites like Dyess and Barksdale Air Force Bases remain unblurred, as do large Navy installations such as Pearl Harbor and Norfolk. Google Maps has not made similar changes to these locations.
A commentary piece draws a parallel between today's enterprise AI landscape and the pre-Google search market of the late 1990s, when engines like AltaVista and portals like Yahoo! competed mainly on capturing user attention for advertising. The author argues current enterprise AI is built on rented foundation models rather than proprietary intelligence, and calls for a breakthrough akin to Google's PageRank that would let companies own their AI advantage rather than lease it.
Google has joined Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft in committing to recognize a proposed robots.txt directive that lets publishers block AI training crawlers with a single common signal instead of separate rules per company. The proposal, authored by Anthropic's Kevin Kelley and under consideration at the IETF, introduces a dedicated user-agent tag that can block or selectively allow scraping for AI training without affecting normal search indexing. Anthropic has already begun honoring it, Microsoft and Google plan support in 2027, and OpenAI says it will implement it within months.
Google rolled out chat themes to Google Messages in late August 2026, allowing users to set custom colors and wallpapers for individual conversations, a feature long available in other messaging apps. An Android Authority writer shared ten custom themes built from the app's included wallpaper collections, such as texture and space-photo backgrounds, paired with various accent color options.
Android Authority has outlined five upcoming Android devices it considers worth saving for, including Motorola's Signature 27, Samsung's Galaxy S27 Ultra and Galaxy Z TriFold 2, Google's Pixel 11a, and the OnePlus 16. The Signature 27 is tipped to use a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset and offer seven years of software support, though pricing details remain unconfirmed.
An Android Authority writer says the OPPO Enco X4 true wireless earbuds solved a persistent fit problem he had with Google's Pixel Buds Pro 2. He notes the Pixel Buds Pro 2 eartips never created a secure seal for him, often requiring third-party eartip swaps to work properly, while he still credits the Pixel Buds Pro 2 for compact design, sound quality and live Gemini chat integration.
Google has put its first satellite designed to host data center-style compute into orbit, according to reports. The spacecraft is reportedly operational and has been used to run basic AI workloads, including generating text output as a demonstration.