All posts tagged: search

Stellar flares may hamper search for life in promising star system

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Illustration of TRAPPIST-1, a red-dwarf star with at least seven orbiting planets Mark Garlick/Alamy The search for atmospheres around the TRAPPIST-1 star system, one of the most promising locations for life elsewhere in the galaxy, might be even more difficult than astronomers first thought because of short-lived radiation blasts from the star. TRAPPIST-1, first discovered in 2016, is a small red dwarf star about 40 light years from Earth with at least seven planets orbiting it. It is a prime target for astronomers hoping to detect extraterrestrial life because several of its planets appear to sit in a habitable zone where temperatures are just right for liquid water. But in order to support life, those planets would have to retain atmospheres. So far, extensive observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have failed to find evidence of atmospheres on any of the planets. Now, Julien de Wit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have detected microflares coming from the TRAPPIST-1 star every hour or so that last for several minutes. These …

Adobe’s LLM Optimizer puts your brand in gen AI search results

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[ad_1] Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more At the Cannes Lions festival on June 16, 2025, Adobe introduced Adobe LLM Optimizer, a new enterprise-grade tool designed to help businesses improve their visibility in generative AI-powered environments. As conversational interfaces like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude reshape how consumers search and engage online, Adobe’s new application aims to give brands the ability to understand and influence how they appear in these rapidly evolving digital spaces. Backed by data from Adobe Analytics showing a 3,500% increase in AI-sourced traffic to U.S. retail sites and a 3,200% spike to travel sites between July 2024 and May 2025, Adobe’s move comes at a time when the shift toward generative interfaces is accelerating. These tools are not only changing the mechanics of discovery—they are redefining what it means to be visible and influential online. “The adoption of GenAI-powered chat services is astounding, with massive year-over-year growth,” said Haresh Kumar, senior director of strategy and …

Police to test clothes and bone fragments in new search for Madeleine McCann

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[ad_1] German police, who relaunched their investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, have found bone fragments and clothing samples, according to reports. The items were discovered during a dig near the resort in Praia da Luz, where the young girl, aged two, was taken from her room. The police had been searching through Atalaia, also known as the Fisherman’s Trail, in what is believed to be a £300,000 operation. WATCH: A brief history of the Madeleine McCann case According to the MailOnline, the items are “animal bones” and “old adult clothing,” with one officer telling the publication: “We always knew it was going to be a waste of time, but we have to show cooperation. What did they expect to find after 18 years? We were happy to work with them but we knew it would be a waste of time.” © Ferdaus ShamimKate and Gerry McCann, wearing t-shirts printed with a photo of their missing daughter Madeleine CNN Portugal reported that “several items were seized that will be examined further by the German police” in …

You Need to Try These Clever Circle to Search Tricks

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Circle to Search is a nifty search tool that lets you quickly look up what’s on your phone’s screen without leaving the current app. While you may already be aware of and use Circle to Search for many things, let’s dive in to explore some clever use cases. 1 Fact-Check Claims Misinformation and disinformation are becoming increasingly common on the internet, and you probably come across them every day on social or messaging apps. However, if you have a phone that supports using Google’s Circle to Search feature, it’s surprisingly easy to examine misleading content. Start by opening the page, photo, or text snippet containing the claim you want to verify. Then, activate Circle to Search and select the content with a false claim. Circle to Search will then automatically look the claim up on the internet and return a response for the same in a Google Search results panel. Most of the time, it’d be an AI-generated summary as part of Google’s AI Overviews. However, if Circle to Search doesn’t return a fact-checking …

s3: The new RAG framework that trains search agents with minimal data

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[ad_1] Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have introduced s3, an open-source framework designed to build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems more efficiently than current methods.  s3 can benefit developers creating real-world large language model (LLM) applications, as it simplifies and reduces the cost of creating retriever models within RAG architectures. RAG retrieval The effectiveness of any RAG system hinges on the quality of its retrieval component. In their paper, the researchers categorize the evolution of RAG approaches into three distinct phases. “Classic RAG” systems rely on static retrieval methods with fixed queries, where retrieval quality is disconnected from the ultimate generation performance. These architectures struggle with queries requiring contextual or multi-hop reasoning. A subsequent phase, dubbed “Pre-RL-Zero,” introduces more active LLM participation during inference. These techniques involved multi-turn interactions, interleaving query generation, retrieval, and reasoning. However, they typically depend on zero-shot prompting and lack trainable components to optimize retrieval through direct outcome signals. The most recent …

The search continues for the Bank / Lender of the Year

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[ad_1] Once again, we’re gearing up to bring together the South Coast region’s top corporate finance teams, lawyers, lenders, transaction service teams and more for an unmissable night of networking and awards. All set to be held at the Hilton at the Utilita Bowl on the 11th of September 2025, the South Coast Deals Awards serve as an evening of celebration as we recognise the excellence in commercial dealmaking in such an active and vibrant area. One category in particular that has become a staple of this highly respected annual programme is the title of Bank / Lender of the Year. This award will be presented to the bank or alternative lender that has had the most significant impact within the region on the completion of deals and demonstrated support (financing and other) to businesses. Funding can include asset finance/leasing products, peer-to-peer and crowdfunding platforms in support of businesses in the region. Our independent judges will be considering a range of factors when selecting this year’s overall winner, including testimonials from both clients and partners, …

Everything Google Announced at I/O 2025

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[ad_1] Some of these Gemini features will be coming to users of Android and Google’s web apps for free, but others (and the more powerful feature sets) will be available via paid subscription. Google’s $20 a month AI Premium service has been renamed to Google AI Pro, and the cost stays the same, though it now comes with more limited features. Google AI Ultra, the company’s full suite of AI services, has increased to $250 per month. That’s $50 per month more expensive than OpenAI’s similar full-suite plan, ChatGPT Pro Gemini Is an Artist, Actually Creative professionals and programmers take note: Google’s enhancements to its creative tools will either make your job easier and more productive, or it will render you obsolete. Jules is an “asynchronous coding agent” that aims to let you take a rough design scribbled on a napkin and turn it into a full-fledged illustration or code, while showing you the work it did along the way. There’s also a new version of Google’s AI image generator called Imagen 4 that Google …

With AI Mode, Google Search Is About to Get Even Chattier

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[ad_1] Last year, I wrote about how one of my articles, previously appearing at the top of search results, was swallowed up and bumped down on the page by an AI Overview. Google eventually adjusted how it cited sources and more prominently added links beside individual paragraphs. While publishers seem primarily concerned about the wave of AI search tools siphoning off visitors who would otherwise go straight to the sources of online information, some marketers are finding those visitors who do end up landing on their promotional sites are of higher quality. “We’re definitely seeing that the traffic you do get is more engaged,” says Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge, an SEO platform for marketers. “By the time they’ve done three more interactions with AI and then clicked on my website, they’re much better qualified. So, the engagement metrics, like time on site and convertment rates, are up.” For Lily Ray, an SEO strategy executive at the marketing agency Amsive, the idea of fewer visitors that are of a seemingly higher quality is …

These Results Illustrate Why Google Search Is So Awful in 2025

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[ad_1] If searching Google feels slower, messier, and less reliable than it used to, that’s because it is. Google’s results are now dominated by AI-generated text, aggressive ads, and SEO-optimized clutter, burying the trustworthy information you’re searching for. The AI Overview Often Misses the Mark Google’s AI-generated overviews, meant to provide quick answers at the top of search results, often fall short of being genuinely helpful. These summaries tend to be overly simplistic, lack nuance, and pull from questionable sources that aren’t always reliable. For example, when I searched “How to clean a cast iron skillet without ruining it,” I expected to see specific guidance grounded in cooking best practices. Instead, the AI Overview spits out a generic list: avoid harsh scrubbing, rinse with soapy water, use a salt scrub, and even clean rust with a potato and baking soda. Not only was it contradictory (first warning against soap, then recommending it), but it also pulled most of its information from Reddit threads, Quora posts, and YouTube videos. None of whom are recognized authorities on …

In Search of Almas Ali | Sarah Haque

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[ad_1] Sarah Haque A group portrait of several prominent Bengali politicians, including Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (center), then prime minister of Pakistan; Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (standing, right), later the first president of Bangladesh; and Almas Ali (far right), the author’s grandfather, Dhaka, circa 1950s Growing up, on playgrounds where children compared scars or the size of their houses, I liked to offer that my grandfather, a man named Almas Ali, was assassinated. He was “assassinated,” I stressed, because he was, from what I understood, a fairly prominent Bangladeshi politician. “Killed” felt too passive for a man of that stature; “missing, presumed dead” might have been technically true but sounded both callous and overly sanguine. And “murder,” although accurate, evoked a flurry of violence and intent too ugly to confront. Assassinated was clean, bloodless. My mother had passed down the story like a family heirloom. The particulars were murky, but I could recite the main turns: that Nana was a beloved leader who was killed by his own countrymen; that he was branded a traitor; but that …