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Yahoo and AOL will form Oath, a new company, under Verizon

Jun 13, 2017
Verizon is expected to close on its $4.4 billion acquisition of Yahoo today after nearly a year of negotiations. Verizon will combine Yahoo with its property AOL to create Oath, the largest digital media company in the United States, with more visitors than Google. Will Oath have a chance to compete with Google and Facebook […]

Uber fires star engineer at heart of self-driving legal battle

May 31, 2017
A top and very expensive engineer at Uber is out. The company has fired the engineer at the center of a high-stakes legal battle with Waymo, the self-driving venture of Alphabet’s Google. Earlier this year, Anthony Levandowski was accused of stealing trade secrets from his former job at Google. After he refused to hand over evidence, […]

Google tries to connect the dots between online ads and offline buys

May 24, 2017
Online shopping is sometimes just that — shopping. The actual buying happens later — in an actual store. Until now, retailers haven’t been able to connect those dots. Google says it has a tool that will let them connect online clicks to in-store buys. Good for Google, which may be able to sell more search […]

Tech giants elbow in on Amazon’s cloud computing profits

Apr 28, 2017
There was a common theme in some of the big tech earnings announcements this week: the cloud. Most of Amazon’s more than $700 million first-quarter profit came not from shipping books and electronics all over the globe, but from its Amazon Web Services business. Amazon was a pioneer in letting companies rent computer processing and […]

Why would Google want to block its own ads?

Apr 20, 2017
The Wall Street Journal is reporting, according to unnamed sources, that Google plans to introduce an ad-blocking feature on its Chrome web browser. Yes, that Google. The one that makes a lot of money selling those ads. So why would it want to make it easier for users to escape them? Click the audio player […]

How the internet went from a hippie project to a game of Monopoly

Apr 19, 2017
In 'Move Fast and Break Things,' Jonathan Taplin examines how the wild web's big players became overlords.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

New Google-Adobe font makes Asian scripts consistent, and that's a big deal

Apr 17, 2017
The Noto serif CJK works across Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Photo courtesy of Adobe

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True: Google is now fact-checking your search results

Apr 7, 2017
The internet, as we learned all too well during the election, makes the public more susceptible to fake news. Facebook announced fake news-spotting tips for its users this week. Now Google has expanded a tool to help users decide how true a given search result might be by telling users if it’s been fact-checked. Its […]

Companies are pulling ads from YouTube to protect their brands

Mar 23, 2017
Multiple U.S. companies are pulling their ads from YouTube over offensive material. AT&T, Verizon and Johnson & Johnson’s decision follows other companies here and abroad that will stop advertising until Google can guarantee their ads won’t run before videos containing hate speech. Google says it’s committed to working on a resolution, but there are technological […]

False information on the internet is hiding the truth about onions

Mar 14, 2017
Tom Scocca wants to fight "the darkness of falsehood." He's starting with onions.







Google changed the search results on how long it takes to caramelize onions after Tom Scocca's recent blog post.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images