Google is Officially a Monopoly. Now What?
- August 5, a U.S. Federal Judge ruled that Google has maintained a monopoly in the search and advertising markets, citing its dominant market share and anticompetitive practices.
- Google pays billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on devices and browsers, resulting in a market share of 89.2% of general search services, and 94.9% on mobile devices.
- Competitors like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo hold less than 6% market share combined.
- The Judge’s ruling cites Google’s intentional creation of friction points to discourage users from switching search engines.
- Google plans to appeal the decision.
- Potential consequences are likely years away, but could include selloff, restructuring, or cessation of default search engine payments.
Patchstack Launches Academy for Educating Security Researchers
- Patchstack Academy is a collaborative platform for security researchers and developers to learn and contribute.
- “WordPress is an amazing CMS, but it causes some security issues… the more researchers there are, the more secure is the whole ecosystem.”
- The platform is for beginners and experienced researchers alike, focusing on understanding WordPress-specific security challenges.
- Participants are encouraged to review the How to Contribute guide before creating or fixing content.
OpenAI Reimagines Web Search with SearchGPT
- OpenAI has introduced SearchGPT, a combination of AI models with real-time web information for faster answers.
- The prototype offers direct responses to questions with up-to-date information and relevant source links.
- Users can ask follow-up questions, building context with each query for more natural interaction.
- SearchGPT partners with publishers for high quality journalistic content and helps users discover publishers’ sites.
- Join the waitlist to try out SearchGPT for yourself.
Worth a Look
- Think you can tell spot the AI Images? I did, but I was wrong. Try this “Real or Not” challenge.
- The Divi team has launched Divi Dash, a dashboard to manage all your sites in one place – free for Divi license holders!
- Webflow has increased it’s rates by about 44%. Here are some helpful thoughts from WebDev Studio about moving from Webflow to WordPress.
