In November, Google said it would conduct a ”test” in eight European countries that would omit results from EU-based news publishers for a small percentage of users. The results are in, and the survey says the news has no meaningful monetary value for the company. But the ”public experiment” was hardly done for scientific curiosity. European copyright law says the company must pay publishers for using snippets from articles, and Google will likely use the data to try to kneecap news outlets’ negotiating leverage.

”During our negotiations to comply with the European Copyright Directive (EUCD), we’ve seen a number of inaccurate reports that vastly overestimate the value of news content to Google,” the company bluntly wrote in its blog post explaining the experiment’s results. ”The results have now come in: European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

There’s a lot of talk recently about Siri being behind the competition. Siri often can’t find what you’re looking for, or what you want to know, and there’s no telling when it might be able to. Many of the requests we make to Siri are basically searches, and when we are unhappy with Siri we turn to search on the web for answers, or in the case of local files or music, we just manually dig it up ourselves.

So here’s a thought for those who might suddenly find themselves in charge of Siri: Search is a foundational element of smart assistants, and the current state of Apple’s search technologies leaves much to be desired.

At this point, pretty much all the rumors hint at Apple launching a new ultra-slim iPhone later this year, which is expected to be called the iPhone 17 Air. The idea is to create an iPhone with a brand new design to make it more appealing. But will the iPhone 17 Air really convince people to upgrade?

What the iPhone 17 Air rumors say

Apple wants the iPhone 17 Air to be the thinnest iPhone the company has ever made. Currently, that title belongs to the iPhone 6 at 6.9 millimeters thick. For the iPhone Air, Apple hopes to achieve a thickness of 5.5 millimeters. Having such a thin iPhone will certainly be impressive, but thinness comes with a lot of compromises.

Over the last week, multiple users have reported that YouTube is not meeting its usual quality standards. Some videos and Shorts display as a garbled, pixelated mess. The company is aware of the problem and is working on a fix, but does not know what is causing the quasi-outage.

Over the past few days, many viewers have reported that YouTube seems to have gone back to the digital stone age. The 20-year-old video-sharing platform struggles to provide optimal, or even moderately decent, streaming quality, resorting to the lowest video resolutions despite users having ample network bandwidth.