Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google is rolling out changes to AdWords Ad Rank thresholds: What you need to knowMay 15, 2017 by Ginny Marvin Bids can carry more weight in …

Google releases a new version of Android at least once a year, but the overwhelming majority of users won’t see that update for many months–if they see the updates at all. Google’s own Pixel and Nexus phones get the software quickly, but everyone else has to wait for multiple parties …

Update:  The “unlocked” devices Netflix is refusing to support may refer to bootloader-unlocked devices rather than carrier-unlocked devices. Carrier unlocking refers to the practice of allowing a device purchased from one company to run on another company’s network, while bootloader unlocking allows a smartphone to run a completely different version …

Earlier this year, Qualcomm announced that some of its next-generation ARM chips would actually be used for Windows 10 devices. This came as a bit of a surprise–while Qualcomm and Microsoft have worked together previously, as far back as Windows 8, but most of the devices that shipped with the …

Last week, we discussed the appearance of a new type of ransomware and the havoc it has wreaked across the internet. WannaCrypt (also known as Wanna, Wannacry, or Wcry) uses NSA-derived exploits and has hit tens of thousands of systems worldwide. Infections have spread across the globe and included institutions …

MP3’s have been a fixture of the internet and the broader technological landscape since many of us first got online. While largely supplanted by newer audio compression schemes, including some that feature lossless encoding, MP3 is the fallback option for when you need an audio format that’s guaranteed to play …

A new and aggressive form of ransomware started infecting computers late last week. The UK’s national Health Service (NHS) and Spanish telco Telefónica were among the most high-profile victims of the WannaCry malware, also known as WanaCrypt0r 2.0.  As bad as the infection was, it could have been much worse …

Giant sloths, massive animals that lived in the Americas during the Ice Age, subsisted on an exclusively plant-based diet, according to an isotopic analysis of bones reported in the journal Gondwana Research. Megatherium sloths. Image credit: Robert Bruce Horsfall. Sloths may well rank among the world’s most peculiar animals: with …

For the first time, physicists have succeeded in observing and studying in detail the hydrogen bonds in a single molecule. Quantitative measurements of the C?O***H–C bond: (A) schematic drawing of the hydrogen bonding measurement on trifluorantheno[3.3.3]propellane with a CO-functionalized tip; right shows the AFM image. Scale bar – 300 pm; …

A team of researchers from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has tackled the question ‘what causes the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe’ in a study that tries to resolve a major incompatibility issue between two theories: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory …