Trump likely to extend TikTok sale deadline
TikTok is no closer to agreeing a deal to sell its US operations despite having less than 30 days before a potential ban. News reports claim negotiations have stalled.
However, Donald Trump could again throw the social media app a lifeline. The US president says there's “a lot of interest” from buyers and that he’ll probably extend the deadline if a deal isn’t struck by early April.
It’s now been two months since TikTok went dark for 24 hours in the US before returning with a message thanking Trump for intervening. The app is now also available on iOS and Android again despite the looming ban.
More than 5 trillion Google searches made every year
Google’s popularity might be waning slightly, but it’s still racking up 5 trillion searches every year, according to a new study. That equates to 417 billion searches a month and a colossal 158,548 every second.
Google revealed the number in an official blog post. It’s almost a decade since the tech giant last disclosed it was handling around 2 trillion queries annually.
A separate study also published this week found the average American desktop user conducts 126 Google searches every single month, with around nine in ten — surprisingly — still navigating to Google’s homepage to perform them.
X says more Gen Z are using the platform
X has struggled with falling user numbers for a while now, with a number of reports citing a notable decline since Elon Musk acquired the social media app. However, a new first-party ad campaign has trumpeted a surge of ‘Zoomers’.
X claims that there has been an 8% increase in the number of Gen Z users logging on during the last year. Perhaps more interestingly, a third of X’s entire user base now belongs to Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012.
While X claims to be “reeling in millions of influential users drawn to brands rooted in authenticity and immediacy”, this doesn’t exactly square with other data sources.
The highly regarded Pew Research stated in its last report that X is actually becoming less popular, with just 17% of teens now using it, down from 23% in 2022.
Google upgrades AI Overviews
Google rolled out upgrades to AI Overviews this week. The AI-generated summaries atop search results are now tapping into Gemini 2.0, a new multimodal model with improved capabilities.
In an official announcement on Wednesday (5 March), Google said:
“Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced maths and multimodal queries, with more on the way.”
Google added that AI Overviews will appear more frequently for these query types and that the responses will generally be faster and of better quality.
