#web-search — Public Fediverse posts

via #AIFoundry : From single call to agents: five new Claude capabilities now available in Microsoft Foundry

https://ift.tt/rIfgCFp
#Claude #Foundry #MicrosoftFoundry #Azure #WebSearch #WebFetch #StructuredOutputs #MCPConnector #ToolSearch #Agents #LLMs #EnterpriseAI #AIinFou…

Stract is gone. You might remember me mentioning an open search engine called Stract that I was using for some search experiments a couple years ago. I went to check on an API question and found that the search engine had been taken down. The developer, Mikkel Denker, told me he took the site down in early June. I told him I appreciated the work he put into Stract. Small search engines aren’t […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google AI Overviews With AI-Generated Images In The Wild. “A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.”

Holy heck @ddg. I'm just trying to cross-reference 2 search keywords; a domain name and a topic, looking for pages under that domain on that topic. This is a basic web search function that DDG *used to* handle fine. Now it utterly refuses, even when I add a "+" between the 2 keywords.

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#DDG #WebSearch #search

I'm not a software engineer or a protocol expert. I'm literally just making this stuff up on the fly to explore the problem space.

But I think the key takeaway here is that decentralising web search requires unbundling 3 distinct functions, which traditional search engines monopolize in one place;

1) crawling to create a search index

2) providing access to that search index

3) providing an interface that accepts queries, ranks results, and presents them

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#WebSearch #search

@PVTejas

Android Authority: You may now qualify for Google’s new Search profile, here’s how to check. “If you have ever wished Google Search could give your favorite creators or publishers something closer to a social media profile, Google is getting there. The company launched Search profiles in June, giving eligible publishers and creators a dedicated space to bring their websites, social accounts, […]

Search Engine Watch: Google tests sponsored results with new subheading. “Google is now testing a change that displays the websites name directly under sponsored results. Normally, sponsored results just carry the ‘Sponsored Results’ heading, but this test adds a subheading ‘from website icon and website name.'”

TechSpot: Google is testing a new homepage that buries the search button for AI. “As spotted by Search Engine Watch, Google’s latest ‘experiment’ is a new Search homepage shown to users who have not signed into their Google Account. The new page encourages netizens to use more Google AI services, pushing traditional web search queries into the background.” Gross.

Concord Monitor: Granite Geek: Science Cafe returns to Concord as the internet falls apart. “This carnage on click-throughs caused by A.I. summaries is so great and happening so quickly that NPR has called it an ‘extinction-level event’ for journalism sites dependent on viewership-based ad revenue. The industry is brainstorming how to react, but a decade of watching us in the media whipsawed by […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Meta/Facebook Crawling Web & May Be Building Search Engine. “Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is allegedly crawling the web and in the process of building its own search engine.”

Daniel N. let me know about his new site, the revamped CiteMe (https://citeme.app. ) CiteMe rang a bell so I asked him when it launched. He replied “The site originally launched in 2024 as a citation generator, built around a Chrome extension. I bought it in January 2026 and rebuilt it completely. The old version generated citations with a language model, which is exactly how fabricated […]

Search Engine Land: Google confirms testing new buttons on home page to drive users to AI-powered search features. “Google is testing new buttons on the Google home page, right beneath the search box, to encourage searchers to try out AI Mode and other AI-powered search features. The buttons are named create images, ask about files and brainstorm and when clicked on, it takes you into AI Mode.” […]

Reuters: French press body asks competition watchdog to take action over Google AI. “A French press association has asked ​the country’s competition watchdog to take action against ‌Google’s artificial intelligence-generated article summaries, which the trade group says deprive newspapers and magazines of readers.”

PsyPost: Does Google Search favor a liberal view on immigration?. “Google search results for immigration topics tend to present an overall positive view of the issue, according to a recent analysis of Swedish search data. The research, published in Heliyon, found that while the links skew slightly positive, the search engine tends to place neutral, unpoliticized sources at the very top of the […]

Search Engine Watch: 11 best alternative search engines to Google in 2026. “In recent years, Google has made significant changes that have particularly impacted publishers and other content creators. At the same time, we’ve witnessed the rise of alternative search engines. Although Google continues to dominate the market, there are many reasons you might consider exploring other options. […]

Update on Bing use-case: quickly view a Gregorian calendar month display with new features and without Copilot noise.

In 2024, I wrote about a use-case for Bing where it vastly outshines all other search engines. https://tantek.com/2024/287/t3/bing-use-case-calendar-month

Since then, Bing has added “Copilot” LLM generated results to the top of search results by default, and unfortunately they add zero value to calendar month searches and displays. Worse, Copilot’s “summary” can often be long enough to push the actual calendar month display “below the fold” as it were.

Solution: add " -ai" to your query.

E.g. assuming you’ve setup Firefox search shortcuts as I recommended (https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox)

Type this into your Firefox address bar:

b 2026 sep -ai

or directly go to https://bing.com/ and enter: 2026 sep -ai

and press return. You should see a days and weeks grid display for September 2026, with the current day of the month (the 9th as I’m writing this) selected in the displayed month.


Note the new calendar month display features since I last blogged this in 2024:
* Day 252 — day of the year! September 9th of 2026 is the 252nd day of 2026.
* Week 37 — Sept 9th is also on the 37th week of 2026
* 31 days later — Sept 9th is 31 days from today (August 9th).
* < [ Sep v ] > – little anglebracket arrows on either side of the month button/dropdown to one-click nav to the prev/next month
* [ Start Day v ] — a new “Start Day” drop down button to change which day of the week to display as the start of the week

Amazing that despite already being far better than any other search engine for year month queries, Bing has *improved* its calendar month display search results, while Duckduckgo, Google, Yahoo are just as useless (yes I checked) as they were two years ago (I also tried Ecosia and it was no better). I am hashtagging them all to see if anyone at those other search engines notices and gets around to implementing a similar calendar month display.

#search #webSearch #SearchShortcut #Microsoft #Bing #MicrosoftBing #BingSearch #BingTip #searchTip #calendar #month
#CoPilot #NoCoPilot #NoAI #NoGenAI #NoLLM #Firefox #DuckDuckGo #Google #GoogleSearch #Yahoo #YahooSearch #Ecosia.

#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

Search Engine Watch: Google says Reddit gets no special preference in search. “Google communications representative Jennifer Kutz confirmed to The Verge that Reddit gets no preferential treatment in Google’s search rankings or AI search features.”

TechSpot: Google’s AI somehow knew a game secret that existed only in a private Google Doc. “What we know so far: After a player asked Google’s AI about unreleased content in his game, an indie developer says it returned a character name that existed only in a private Google Doc. Klub Kofta Studio, the solo developer behind the tower defense game Operation Octo, said the character, called […]

Ars Technica: Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment. “In the mid-’90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and […]

The irony hits different. Yesterday you are comparing Google, Bing, Ecosia, Qwant to find your search engine. Today you are comparing Parallel, Exa, Valyu, Serper to find your AI agents search engine. Same human activity, completely different requirements — freshness, structured data, token efficiency, latency. The criteria flip entirely when it is not you reading the results but a model reasoning over them. 😄

#AI #Search #AIAgents #WebSearch

Search Engine Land: What happens when AI Overviews contradict paid search ads?. “For months, the search industry across SEO and PPC has been bracing for the ultimate SERP fusion: an all-in-one AI panel where your sponsored ad, your organic citation, and your Merchant Center product card appear in a single, pixel-efficient layout. I set out to find screenshots of it for this article. I didn’t […]

Gizmodo: Google’s AI Search Reportedly Told Users That Flock Cameras Are a Goldmine. “It’s become a running joke online and in privacy-focused communities that Flock cameras contain valuable material like gold, copper, and zinc, a bit meant to (jokingly!) encourage people to smash open the cameras and take what’s inside. Google’s AI Overview doesn’t have much of a sense of humor and, […]

I've taken to using Brave Search, in parallel with DuckDuckGo, as my general web search engine.

There's no obvious way to turn off the auto-summaries by whatever Trained #MOLE Brave are using, and unlike on DDG, they embed specific lists of standard search results within the text, in an attempt to back up specific points. So I end up kind of using it, even though I presume its output is nonsense until proven otherwise, which it often is.

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#WebSearch #AI

The Verge: Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam?. “…a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI. In an effort to try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers, marketers have descended upon Reddit, a pseudo-anonymous platform that users have […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Tests Sign In To Verify Searches Are Human (Not Captcha). “Google Search is testing asking searchers to sign in to verify they are humans and not bots conducting the searches. I don’t think Google has done this before, geneally when Google tries to verify human versus bot activity, Google will serve a captcha and has done so for many years. But this test […]

Poynter: As search and social traffic dries up, local newsrooms turn to Reddit. “Last October, the Big 12 conference issued a rule change that only really makes sense if you watch Big 12 football: Fans at Texas Tech’s Jones AT&T Stadium were no longer allowed to throw tortillas onto the field during the opening kickoff. In another era, it’s a story that The Dallas Morning News — located […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Blames Website For Race Based AI Overview Response. “Normally, I wouldn’t cover political topics like this, but with Google trying to copyright its search results, including AI Overview responses, I thought it was appropriate. Google responded to complaints about a race-based AI Overview answer, blaming the websites it sourced, rather than taking credit for the […]

Search Engine Land: AI models favor familiar brands in search: Study. “AI models searched for brands they already knew 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar brands, according to a new study. Models searched for familiar brands 55.7% of the time, compared with 17.4% for brands outside their top 10, geoSurge found.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Related Searches Based On Your Browsing. “Google is now testing showing related searches based on your browsing. I suspect this is based on your browsing history on Chrome, beyond what you may search for in Google but based on what pages you browse.”