best ai search engine 2026

The WSU research team modulated one interaction of a common and complex virus protein, called glycoprotein B , to prevent viruses from fusing with cells and causing illness. Credit: WSU Washington State University researchers have found a way to modulate a common virus protein to prevent viruses from entering cells where it can cause illness, a discovery that could someday lead to new antiviral treatments. In the fundamental research, reported in the journ

Published on August 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM Comment 1 𝕏 Print © Spotify A singer with 168,000 followers who never existed, songs generated on an assembly line, and listeners who see nothing but fire: Spotify is finally rolling out the labels. A Frenchman had shown the way. On streaming platforms, artificial intelligence no longer merely assists musicians: it creates them from scratch, faces included. Spotify announced on Tuesday the rollout, starting from mid-

Published on August 17, 2026 at 5:02 PM Comment 8 𝕏 Print © JESHOOTS.COM / Unsplash Ghost restaurants, forgotten visas, and dangerous hiking routes: using artificial intelligence to organize your vacation can be a very risky bet. No more dog-eared old guidebooks and dozens of tabs open on the computer. Nowadays, one in four French people—and even one-third of those under 35, according to the Kantar Institute—is considering entrusting the organization of th

On Monday, Apple announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years. This is the “largest-ever” spending commitment that Apple has made in the US, supporting “a wide range of initiatives” focused on artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing, advanced research and development, and worker training. About 20,000 jobs will be created over those four years, Apple said, “of which the vast majority will be focused on R&D, silico

Shutterstock / Futurism New research gives us a grim portrait of how rampant AI usage is affecting young students’ academic performance and learning. In a study that tracked nearly 27,000 students in China between the ages of 12 and 18 (grades 7-12), around 80 percent reported using AI models like DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Doubao. The remaining 20 percent, who abstained from using AI, formed the control group. What the researchers from Stockholm University

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images/Futurism An Oregon man falsely posing as a professional football player and his young accomplice scammed roughly $1.3 million out of at least 26 women across four states, the FBI alleges. The duo’s efforts to bolster the con online eventually got sucked into Google’s misinformation-plagued AI Overviews feature, which parroted it back as fact — a blunder that the accused scammers seemingly tried to use to further ensnare victims. The

Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, went on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday and made a crack about AI-pilled tech people smoking because they think AI will cure cancer. On its face, it’s the kind of thing a 13-year-old whose uncle “works at Nintendo” would say. But hey, now that he’s said it on TV, maybe it’ll come true. “Alright I’m going to start smoking now” says probably-kidding-but-maybe-not X user @beep1984 in response to a post about Sankar’s quote. Another

Composite panels made with Australian reishi fungi and biomass waste. Credit: Kumar Biswajit Debnath/UTS When mushrooms make the news, it's often for grim reasons—a mysterious poisoning, toxic species in the bush, or high-profile court cases. But the mushroom itself is only the fruit body. Beneath every cap lies the real organism: a hidden network of white threads weaving through soil and wood. And that underground network, called mycelium, may help solve

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Artificial intelligence is getting more powerful—but it's also racking up a massive energy bill. Some estimate that one maximum-length ChatGPT query can use about twice as much power as an average U.S. home does in one minute. Multiply that by billions of queries and the enormous training AI models require, and the energy impact is staggering. As researchers are racing to find greener ways to power AI, a new study led by T

(From left) Walid Saad and Alexander DeRieux present their novel eQMARL framework at the opening of Academic Building One in Alexandria. Credit: Luke Hayes for Virginia Tech Any time you use a device to communicate information—an email, a text message, any data transfer—the information in that transmission crosses the open internet, where it could be intercepted. Such communications are also reliant on internet connectivity, often including wireless signal

Representative false-color SEM images of treated P. aeruginosa and S. aureus monomicrobial and co-biofilms. Credit: npj Biofilms and Microbiomes (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41522-024-00637-y University of Otago scientists are harnessing the power of peptides—the body's own tiny protein molecules—for a spray to help the red meat industry solve headaches around bacterial contamination and spoilage. It's a telltale sign of meat past its use-by date: a sticky, slimy

All about ChatGPT see more All about Artificial Intelligence see more U.S. political candidates are trying to influence what chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini say about them. Documents obtained by Reuters reveal strategies to get these tools to recommend certain names to voters.The initiative relies on publishing content online and monitoring AI responses, which are increasingly being consulted by voters seeking information about candidates and p

Published on August 30, 2026 at 3:03 p.m. Comment 2 𝕏 Print © Capture 01net Google's AI summaries used to be displayed collapsed, with users having to click to read further. This safeguard has just failed: for some queries, the box expands on its own, and the regular links shift a little further down. Since their general rollout, AI Overviews have sat at the top of the results page, in the form of an AI-generated summary that Google used to truncate by def

Published on September 3, 2026 at 3:01 p.m. Comment 7 𝕏 Print © Thomas Estimbre / 01net.com Hacked this summer and called out over its digital defenses, the state is spending big and enlisting Mistral's services to shore up its ministries. One detail complicates the picture: its own officials prefer ChatGPT. It has been a tough summer for the Directorate General of Public Finance. The hacking of the tax authority exposed the tax data of 678,000 individuals

Google’s antitrust remedy trial started this week, and the Department of Justice has produced several witnesses to testify about how Google’s stranglehold on search has slowed their innovation. On day three, Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told the court that Google blocked Perplexity from being the default on Motorola phones, which is precisely the kind of anticompetitive behavior that got it in hot water. It would appear there is some

In an unusual move, Google issued a statement late in the day after Cue’s testimony to dispute the implication that it may already be losing its monopoly. During questioning by DOJ attorney Adam Severt, Cue expressed concern about losing the Google search deal, which is a major source of revenue for Apple. This contract, along with a similar one for Firefox, gives Google default search placement in exchange for a boatload of cash. The DOJ contends that is

Google is constantly making changes to its search rankings, but not all updates are equal. Every few months, the company bundles up changes into a larger “core update.” These updates make rapid and profound changes to search, so website operators watch them closely. The March 2024 update was unique. It was one of Google’s largest core updates ever, and it took over a month to fully roll out. Nothing has felt quite the same since. Whether the update was goo

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google used to be all about the 10 blue links, but that was then, and this is now. You have to scroll farther than ever to get to the links in Google search results, and now this trend is being taken to its ultimate conclusion. At I/O, the company has announced a major expansion of AI Mode search, which heralds a new era for its signature product. There are big changes coming, some of which will start rewriting the web sooner than you

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users. Research