#where-to-look

#where-to-look

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

Buyers no longer open ten tabs, skim through blog posts, and slowly form an opinion over weeks. Instead, they ask a single question to an AI system and receive a shortlist in return, usually two or three companies that feel familiar, credible, and safe enough to justify internally. That shortlist often becomes the entire market in the buyer's mind.

Librarians have been actively collaborating and talking about it almost every day, whether it's creating tutorials and digital learning objectives or thinking about the conversations to have with instructors. It can feel like cognitive dissonance to be actively working with AI on a regular basis and also saying we're constantly thinking about the harms and the biases.

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing digital content for AI-driven discovery so that your brand shows within AI-generated answers to user prompts. The key to winning at GEO is creating and distributing content that AI tools like to read, understand and serve up in their responses.

Developers have spent the past decade trying to forget databases exist. Not literally, of course. We still store petabytes. But for the average developer, the database became an implementation detail; an essential but staid utility layer we worked hard not to think about. We abstracted it behind object-relational mappers (ORM). We wrapped it in APIs. We stuffed semi-structured objects into columns and told ourselves it was flexible.

In June 2025, researchers uncovered a vulnerability that exposed sensitive Microsoft 365 Copilot data without any user interaction. Unlike conventional breaches that hinge on phishing or user error, this exploit, now known as EchoLeak, bypassed human behavior entirely, silently extracting confidential information by manipulating how Copilot interacts with user data. The incident highlights a sobering reality: Today's security models, which are designed for predictable software systems and application-layer defenses, are ill-equipped to handle the dynamic, interconnected nature of AI infrastructure.

Within a couple of years of ChatGPT coming out, I had come to rely on the artificial-intelligence tool, for my work as a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. Having signed up for OpenAI's subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, I used it as an assistant every day - to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching.

Several weeks after Google rolled out support for Preferred Sources globally, Google added official help documentation for site owners to use to help them understand what it is all about and how to encourage their readers to subscribe to your site as a preferred source. In December, Google rolled out Preferred sources globally after rolling it out in the US and India in August and beta testing it in June. Now the new help documentation is available here if you need it.

In 2023, Australia abandoned its expensive and bureaucratic scholar-led research-assessment programme. New Zealand followed suit soon after. The hope, according to a transition plan unveiled by the Australian federal government's Department of Education and the research sector, was to find a "more modern, data-driven approach". In the United Kingdom, where financial pressures on universities are especially acute, there are similar calls to reform the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the country's performance-based research-funding system.

What if you could build your own AI research agent, no coding required, and customize it to tackle tasks in ways existing systems can't? Matt Vid Pro AI breaks down how this ambitious yet accessible project can empower anyone, from students to seasoned professionals, to create a personalized AI capable of conducting deep research, synthesizing data, and delivering actionable insights.

The org revealed the new partnerships in a post celebrating its 25th birthday, and which points out it is among the world's ten most-visited websites, and the only one to be run by a nonprofit. The post notes that 250,000 editors work on at least one Wikipedia article each month, and that editors make 324 changes each minute as they contribute to the 65 million-plus articles the site contains. 1.5 billion unique devices reach Wikipedia each month.