The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.

The present reality is that Google presses the button and updates its algorithm, which in turn can update site rankings What if we are entering a world where it is less of Google pressing a button and ...

New research from Mozilla shows that user controls have little effect on which videos YouTube’s influential AI recommends. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm drives 70% of what people watch on the ...