Google has launched Universal Cart, an AI-powered shopping feature first previewed at I/O in May, now live in the US within the Gemini app and Google Search. It lets users save products from multiple retailers into one shared cart, tracks price drops and restocks, surfaces promo codes, and lets shoppers pay via Google Wallet or move items to a retailer's own checkout. Integration with Gmail and YouTube is planned but has no announced timeline.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
Infino describes how it built a retrieval engine whose full-text, vector and SQL search index lives on S3, GCS or Azure Blob Storage rather than local disk. The company organizes data into Parquet-based 'superfiles' grouped into 'supertables,' each with a manifest and term index, to reduce the number of random reads needed when querying object storage.
infino.ai
· 2026-10-15
Reolink has released the Home Hub 2, a device that lets users monitor and search footage from up to eight cameras simultaneously. The hub includes AI-powered object search capabilities that function even without an internet connection, and does not require an ongoing subscription fee to use.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-10-15
Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed a lightweight tactile sensor modeled on animal whiskers, allowing small drones to detect obstacles by touch rather than vision. The design targets ultra-compact rescue drones, which often operate in smoke-filled or dark environments where cameras and lidar fail. Professor Salwa Hamaza said the sensor must be lightweight, low-latency and low-power to work on such drones.
wired.com
· 2026-10-14
A team planning to investigate a suspected Amelia Earhart crash site on a remote Pacific island says large, meat-eating coconut crabs pose enough of a risk that expedition members will not be able to camp overnight on the island. The crabs are reportedly known to scavenge on remains, complicating efforts to search the site safely.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-13
Google has broadened availability of its Gemini 4 Argon AI model beyond the Fairwind Program to developers via the Gemini API and Antigravity platform, and to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers through the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through November 30, after which costs double. Google says Argon handles complex tasks in finance, coding, creative writing and cybersecurity, and VP Josh Woodward noted it responds faster with fewer hedges and can surface answers while still processing longer queries.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-13
A retrospective piece revisits predictions from Kevin Kelly's 2016 book The Inevitable, including his claim that by 2026 Google's core product would be AI rather than search. The piece recounts Kelly's early-2000s conversation with Larry Page, who told him Google was 'really making an AI,' and argues Google has used search queries to train its AI systems rather than the reverse.
taylor.town
· 2026-10-12
A new tool called Pensieve was benchmarked against plain grep-based search inside Claude Code across four real repositories ranging from 500 to 35,000 files. In held-out code-finding tasks, Pensieve located the correct file in 131 of 144 runs versus 123 of 144 for grep, while using 43% fewer tool calls, costing 18% less per lookup, and finishing 21% faster, with each search taking 0.1 to 0.2 seconds.
tedhaley.ca
· 2026-10-12
GoKawiil describes an experimental reranking technique for its Jev model that decomposes a search query into a set of yes/no relevance questions generated by an LLM, rather than asking a single relevance question. Each question is scored by Jev for the probability of a 'yes' answer, and these probabilities are summed to produce an overall relevance score for a document against the query.
softwaredoug.com
· 2026-10-10
Google has launched a new product called Googlebooks, according to a report questioning the company's continued commitment to the open web. The report frames the release as evidence that Google's priorities have moved away from the web-as-platform vision it once championed.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-10
Microsoft has rolled out a new version of Windows 11's Search feature, rebuilt on the WinUI 3 API for better performance. The update merges search results and previews into one unified list, improves typo and synonym recognition, and adds rich inline previews for things like weather and facts pulled from the web. A new "inline actions" capability also lets users toggle settings and perform quick system tasks directly from the search box.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-09
Microsoft is testing a redesigned Windows Search built on WinUI 3, featuring faster animations, a large inline preview pane, and improved natural-language matching that tolerates typos and synonyms. Corporate VP Anshul Rawat says early tests show better performance and memory usage, and the new interface lets users preview files like PowerPoint slides and photos, send texts, and perform launcher-like actions directly from search.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-08
GoKawiil