Two Wall Street research notes this week argue that Meta's heavy AI investment is starting to show results. Bernstein said AI-powered ad targeting helped Meta grow ad revenue 27% year-over-year in Q2, gaining market share from Google, whose ad network revenue actually declined. Separately, Bank of America highlighted Meta's upcoming personal AI agent, Hatch, reportedly featuring a customizable dashboard and possible premium subscription tier costing up to $199.99 a month, as a potential new revenue source beyond advertising.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-01
Egiziago Cioffi, CEO of Microsoft partner SynSphere Italia, discovered that an Azure OpenAI email assistant he built was returning SharePoint content to a low-privilege test account that the account could not access directly in SharePoint. The assistant had passed all evaluation scores and unit tests, but comparing outputs from a high-privilege and a low-privilege account against identical queries exposed the mismatch, revealing that retrieval was happening under the indexer's permissions rather than the requester's.
venturebeat.com
· 2026-09-01
Keenable has released SELECT, an MCP server that lets an agent query the web using DuckDB SELECT statements instead of clicking through search results. The tool combines web search and fetch operators with semantic extraction functions inside SQL, filtering pages with exact WHERE clauses before sending only surviving rows to an LLM for field extraction. Each generated report links to the full trajectory of queries, tool calls, and result sets used to build it.
keenableai.github.io
· 2026-09-01
Google Search is now showing some AI Overview answers fully expanded by default on desktop, complete with an 'Ask anything' box that launches AI Mode conversations. Previously, this prompt only appeared after users clicked 'Show more' beneath a summary. The change, spotted by an SEO consultant and unconfirmed by Google, currently seems limited to desktop searches for definitions and similar queries.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-31
European regulators have designated ChatGPT as a search engine under EU digital regulations, placing it under stricter oversight requirements. Reddit and Roblox have also received similar classifications, bringing them under the same heightened regulatory scrutiny.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-08-31
A reviewer granted Google's new Personal Intelligence feature access to personal accounts and data to evaluate how it functions as an AI-powered assistant. The tool is designed to make advanced personal AI assistance usable for everyday consumers, not just technically savvy users.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-28
Google has begun automatically expanding AI Overviews at the top of some search results pages, rather than requiring users to click a 'Show more' button. This pushes the usual list of website links, and an 'Ask anything' box, further down the page, forcing more scrolling to reach traditional results. Google says the behavior is inconsistent and applies only to select queries where its systems determine an expanded view is more useful.
theverge.com
· 2026-08-28
A glacial lake outburst flood struck the Nepal-China border region this week, triggering one of the year's deadliest natural disasters with hundreds reported dead or missing. Chinese and Nepali rescue teams are searching the affected areas while humanitarian organizations work to set up shelters, deliver medical aid, and distribute essential supplies to survivors.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-08-28
Samsung has pushed One UI 9 Beta 7 to the Galaxy S26 lineup, quietly adding AI features first seen on the Galaxy Z8 foldables and Galaxy S26 FE. These include My FanCam video reframing, a Call Brief overlay that surfaces calendar and email info during calls, Custom Cards for Now Brief, and combined Finder plus Google Search widgets on the home screen.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-28
A developer released IndexFlow, an open-source infrastructure project built in Rust that provides libraries for parsing XML sitemaps and analyzing technical SEO issues like canonical tags, robots directives, and metadata. The project is structured as modular components, including indexflow-sitemap and indexflow-seo, meant to serve as building blocks for a future commercial platform.
github.com
· 2026-08-28
Android Authority found evidence in Google Tasks version 2026.08.24.96 pointing to a dedicated search bar being developed, including a code string reading 'Search tasks' and an unreleased search icon. The feature isn't active yet, but layout references and XML files suggest Google is building it into the app's interface.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-27
Google is broadening the rollout of its 'find in note' feature in Keep, which lets users search within a single note or list for specific text, similar to Ctrl+F. The feature had appeared in a limited release earlier this month but is now showing up more widely across devices, though not universally yet.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-27
GoKawiil