Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series And college students can get Google AI Pro for free. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Google expands Gemini offerings and Search functions as students head back to school. As districts across the country debate the efficacy of tech-enabled classrooms, Google wants to upgrade the average students' school supplies with new AI features. And they don't even need to leave the Google homepage to find them.

The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors. The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union's search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act . The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services--such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights--in search rankings. Google must also allow app developers to communicate and transact with users outside the Play Store, where it takes a commission on sales .

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Here's how to skip the AI-generated answers and return to a simple list of useful links. Google Search used to feel like a clean list of links. Now half the screen is taken up by AI summaries and sponsored results that try to answer your question before you can even reach a real website. If you're tired of fighting through all of that, try udm14.com .

'Preferred sources' ensures you're seeing the news outlets you want to see. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Get Google News working the way you want it to. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When you search Google for something topical, you might see a cluster of headlines from news outlets, reporting breaking stories related to your search query.

Google is transforming its search engine into an AI-powered assistant called Spark, featuring conversational interactions and a personalized'daily brief' for task management. PCWorld reports the company is expanding mobile search capabilities to handle complex queries using text, images, and video while integrating restaurant reservations and payments. This evolution blurs the line between traditional search and AI assistance, keeping users within Google's ecosystem through proactive monitoring and personalized results.

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The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. The company will also have to hand some search engine data to rivals. The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union's executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices, the Commission said in a statement .