Tech news picked on 2026-11-04
Google's AI search is not yet earning as much as search ads
- In Alphabet's Q3 results, Google search revenue growth was 12% year over year, lower than about 17% in the previous quarter. Search query volume grew at the fastest pace in 5 years, but ad click growth also fell from 13% to 8%, according to the original article.
- Chief business officer Philipp Schindler said exchange rate effects and spending changes by advertisers in some industries were the biggest causes of the slowdown. He also acknowledged that AI Mode (a search method that continues questions in a conversational way) is growing quickly, but a smaller share of it leads to ad revenue than traditional search.
- Google argues that most AI Mode searches are additional questions that do not replace traditional search. This is Google's claim, and the original article does not give figures showing how much AI Mode replaces the more profitable traditional search.
- In Q3, the existing advertiser group of ad agency Tinuiti increased its Google search ad spending by 14% year over year while keeping its ad return targets. However, Google does not let advertisers target ads in the AI answer area separately or view their performance separately, so the scale of AI ad traffic has not been confirmed.
- According to the source, Anthropic is developing FlashProve, an open-source system that checks which AI model a specific output came from. The goal is to use cryptographic proof to confirm whether the answer a user received came from the model they believe they are using.
- The source explains that it could be used to stop AI companies from secretly switching to cheaper models to cut costs, or from using more expensive models to inflate performance figures. This is a possible use suggested by the researchers and is not a confirmed real case.
- The method is to publish a fingerprint for each model when it is released, without revealing the weights. Outputs are then checked cryptographically against this fingerprint. The source says the system was designed to be lightweight so it can be verified even on personal devices.
- Part of the technical specification and working code is published on GitHub under an open license. The source says the research is at an intermediate stage and that there are no plans to deploy it at Anthropic or other labs.
User report that the Postman desktop app automatically installed Codex and Claude Code plugins
- The issue author reported that after opening the Postman desktop 12.33.4, the Postman log recorded that Codex and Claude Code plugins were installed through an automatic upgrade path.
- According to the report, a Postman remote MCP connection and a hook telling Codex to load the Postman skill when a session starts were added to Codex's global settings. The install source code reportedly contains logic to add this hook to the trusted list after installation.
- The report states that this is an observation the reporter made on their own Mac and that it was not reproduced in a clean environment. The report does not claim data exfiltration. The original text contains no official response from Postman.