In the span of just 48 hours this week, two separate juries in two different US states delivered verdicts that could reshape the entire social media industry — not because of the dollar amounts involved, but because of what those verdicts legally establish for the first time. On Tuesday, March 24, a jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram. Less than 24 hours later, on Wednesday, March 25, a jury in Los Angeles found both Meta and Google (YouTube) liable for engineering addiction in young users — finding them negligent in the design of their platforms and awarding a further $6 million in damages. Two days. Two states. Two juries. Both pointing at the same conclusion: that Big Tech can no longer hide behind the legal shields it has relied on for nearly three decades. This is the story of what happened, why it matters far beyond the headline numbers, and what comes next for the s...
Google's share of the search market in the US rose by 1.4% in November. According to researcher Hitwise. Which brings Google's share to 71.6% overall. Which in turn sees a decline in Bing and Yahoo. Which clearly goes to show that the recent aggressive nature of the search engine from Microsoft "Bing" did not really do any damage to Google. " In a report released Wednesday, Hitwise has Google on top and Yahoo and Bing in distant second and third places, respectively. Whereas Yahoo commanded a 16.1 percent search share for October, but declined to 15.4 percent in November. Microsoft and Bing had a smaller decline -- 9.6 percent in October to 9.3 percent in November -- but a decline nonetheless. Hitwise also went on to say that one word search queries were still the biggest contributing to 24% of over all searches. Searches of 8 or more words increased by one percent. Which searches with 5 to 8 words in length remained steady. It is significant to note that bot...