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Google’s new mobile search results, complete with reformatted favicons, site names, and the new “Sponsored” tag. | Image: Google Google is changing how it formats search results on mobile, the company announced today. Paid results will now carry a larger “Sponsored” tag rather than the simple “Ad” tag they had before, and each website’s name is now listed at the top of each search result. The “size and shape” of each website’s favicons are also getting updated to make them easier to see. The new search results format is rolling out now on mobile, and Google says it plans to test a “similar experience” for desktop searches “soon.”In its blog post, the company explains that the new “Sponsored” tag is being introduced to ensure that “ads are clearly labeled” with a tag that’s “prominent and clear across different types of paid content.” Meanwhile, showing site names... Continue reading…

Paramount Plus may not be the most popular streaming service, but it has lots of live soccer. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge We may still be picking ourselves up from the Prime Day hangover, but don’t fret, we’ve gotten some rest, fresh pots of coffee, and more deals. For example, you can get half off an annual subscription to Paramount Plus along with a free Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite streaming dongle. This deal makes the 12-month Essential ad-supported plan just $24.99 (normally $49.99) and the Premium mostly ad-free plan $49.99 (normally $99.99). Plus, you get that Fire TV Stick Lite, capable of streaming up to 1080p, which is a value of $29.99.This promo is based around the UEFA Champions League, which is in the midst of its group stages right now, and a one-year subscription would cover you well beyond the scheduled June 10th final in 2023. But if you’re... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft introduced several new devices this week including the Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, and Surface Studio 2 Plus. They’re all fairly iterative updates; you know that’s true when Microsoft’s hype videos emphasize new colors and integrated 5G connectivity (for the Arm-powered Pro 9) as the most exciting “new” features. We finally got a release date for the helpful accessibility kit, at least.But Microsoft didn’t have anything new to share about its personal audio lineup. It’s been two years since the company announced the Surface Headphones 2. And those arrived around two years after the original pair in 2018. But the October hardware event came and went without any news of Surface Headphones 3. So if two years was the cadence... Continue reading…

Jarett Sitter / The Verge A day in the life of a 20-something on TikTok who works in tech might look something like this: start the day with free breakfast and a latte. Immediately go out for a multihour lunch break. Return to the office and wander around the spacious, light-filled space, visiting the nap room or the Harry Potter-themed meeting space. “Finish up work.” Then head out at 5PM.A LinkedIn employee’s workday includes making face masks for “a little self-care moment,” followed by eucalyptus hand towels and kombucha in the office. A Google employee’s day involves scooters, rooftop views, hanging out with a dog, and meeting up with co-workers.This is the “tech girlie” side of TikTok, where lifestyle vlogging has given rise to a cottage industry of... Continue reading…

Vincent Kilbride / The Verge Last month, all four major online social platforms — Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok — released their plans for combating misinformation and disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2022 US midterms.Meta will have voting alerts, real-time fact-checking in both English and Spanish, and as it did in 2020, it will also be banning “new political, electoral and social issue ads” during the week leading up to the election. Twitter is focusing on “prebunks,” proactively fact-checking content in users’ feeds based on search terms and hashtags and will have election-themed Explore pages. YouTube is rolling out information widgets on search pages for candidates. And TikTok will have curated election hashtags full of vetted information... Continue reading…

Apple’s native iOS keyboard in Dvorak layout. | Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge Here’s a fun iOS 16 feature that’s almost completely slipped under our radar: native support for the Dvorak keyboard layout. Ars Technica reported this week that the touch-typing optimized keyboard can now be selected in Apple’s software alongside the more traditional QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ layouts. Previously, Dvorak on iOS has only been available via an external physical keyboard, or third-party software.Although I’ve gone on the record as being a proud Dvorak user for over a decade, when it comes to touchscreen keyboards I’ve always been happy with QWERTY. The main benefit of Dvorak is the way it shares the workload equally between all of your fingers when touch-typing. It places all the vowels on the left side of the keyboard’s... Continue reading…

Image: Meta During Meta’s Connect conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg made a huge announcement: the avatars in the company’s Horizon VR app will be getting legs soon. To demonstrate this groundbreaking technical achievement, Zuckerberg’s digital avatar lifted each leg in the air, then did a jump, while Aigerim Shorman’s avatar kicked into the air.It may have all been for show. According to UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton, an unnamed Meta spokesperson said that the “the segment featured animations created from motion capture,” meant to “enable this preview of what’s to come.” To me that reads like what we saw wasn’t actually a demo of what Horizon’s legs will look like, but rather an artist’s interpretation of what Horizon’s legs may end up looking... Continue reading…

No, boss, I’m not slacking... and that’s the problem. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’ve had issues with Slack on Thursday, you’re not alone — for most of the day, the service’s status page has reported that “something’s not quite right” with messaging, apps, integrations, APIs, and connections. The issues, which seem to affect threads, channels, notifications and group DMs, lasted for pretty much the entire workday, starting around 9:40AM ET this morning and getting marked as resolved around 5:40PM.Here at The Verge, the problems manifested themselves differently for different people; one of my co-workers described Slack as acting “funky all morning,” noting issues with threads in particular, while another reported that their notifications weren’t showing up correctly and that threads would load at random. For... Continue reading…

Personalized lock screens are so hot in 2022. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s take on Android 13, called One UI 5, is ready to come out of public beta testing “in the coming weeks,” according to a company press release issued today. Highlights include a more personalized lock screen and new modes to filter out unwanted disruptions based on your activity. Sounds an awful lot like iOS 16, and you know what? That’s fine! These are all great features on iOS, and Samsung is smart enough to copy them.One UI 5’s lock screen customization works about the same way that Apple’s does: long-press your lock screen, and you’ll see options to customize your wallpaper and clockface. There’s an option to create a wallpaper using a short video clip, too. Samsung says there are more wallpapers to choose from for your home... Continue reading…

Although Playdots is going away, Two Dots will live on. | Image: Take-Two Take-Two is shutting down the gaming studio Playdots, the creator of puzzle games like Two Dots and the just-released Apple Arcade title Garden Tails, as first reported by Bloomberg. Due to the closure, Take-Two will cut 65 jobs beginning in January, per a New York Department of Labor notice.Take-Two confirmed the decision to shut down the studio in a statement to The Verge. Affected employees will be able to apply for other jobs at Zynga, which was recently acquired by Take-Two, and people who don’t find new roles will be eligible for severance, according to spokesperson Alan Lewis. Take-Two will continue to operate Two Dots through one of its Zynga studios, but the future of other Playdots games like Garden Tails is unclear, and Lewis... Continue reading…

Just over 3,230 to go. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is getting ready to launch two test satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation, built to compete with services like SpaceX Starlink and OneWeb. In a press release on Wednesday, the company says the prototypes, charmingly named Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2, will be riding into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA) in early 2023.The company says the launch will let it perform tests on its satellite network technology with data from space and that the data will “help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system.” The timeframe marks a slight delay from Amazon’s original plan; last year, the company announced it would launch the... Continue reading…

When Dmitry’s boat approached the small island of Kolyuchin, which had been abandoned by humans since 1992, he was surprised to spot movement in one of the houses. Binoculars revealed polar bears — over 20 in total — exploring the ghost town. Dmitry used a low-noise drone to document the surreal experience. | Image: Dmitry Kokh via Natural History Museum As a science reporter, I chase down plenty of stories about how humans interact — often carelessly — with the environment around us. Even so, the stunning photos from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have me shook. It puts furry faces on some of the thorny issues I cover. The images are such an intimate view of wildlife forced to navigate our unnatural world.Humans have engineered a collision course between ourselves and our wild neighbors — through urban sprawl that destroys habitats and climate change that pushes animals into new territory as the world they’ve adapted to transforms. There’s plenty to wonder at and protect in the natural world, as the wildlife photography competition shows us, too. The winning... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok users will soon have a new way of highlighting their videos — and their TikTok presence — on other platforms.As part of the TikTok for developers program, the short-form video platform announced a new feature called Profile Kit today, allowing creators to easily showcase up to six TikTok videos off-platform. To begin, users will be able to integrate their TikTok profiles with Linktree, which already serves as a landing page for TikTok creators to share social links and contact information. Image: Linktree The Linktree integration shows up to six TikTok videos. Users will be able to highlight their latest or most popular clips or handpick videos they want to appear on their Linktree. Viewers,... Continue reading…

Kristen Radtke / The Verge Our fall gift guide includes plenty of ideas for enjoying the turning of the season, whether you want to admire it outside or bundled up at home. Continue reading…

Some lucky shoppers will get to buy these early. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge In a recent post on the GeForce forums, an Nvidia community manager announced that the company is testing a new program called “verified priority access.” The program will give some potential shoppers the opportunity to reserve a GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card without the kerfuffle that can sometimes be required to get their hands on a new GPU.The program, as VideoCardz correctly pointed out, is a similar idea to EVGA’s Elite Priority Access system, which gave the company’s “Elite” members 24 hours of exclusive early access to its new products. Elite status didn’t cost money — users who were active in the company’s forums and Twitch streams or who had purchased and registered EVGA products recently were eligible.... Continue reading…

Kristen Radtke / The Verge Soon, Apple Card users will be able to open a “new high-yield Savings account,” Apple says. There’s just one hitch: Apple won’t say what interest rate it’s offering.There’s also no specific timeline for when consumers can access these savings accounts.Apple has been moving into fintech with the Apple Card, which it partners with Goldman Sachs on. As one of its perks, card users get Daily Cash, Apple’s special branding on the more mundane cashback rewards, on their purchases. The promise of this “high-yield” savings account is that cardholders can have their Daily Cash deposited into it “with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements,” the company says.This isn’t the first savings account offered by a tech... Continue reading…

The game will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store. | Image: Sony Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales for PC will be released on November 18th, Insomniac Games announced on Thursday. You can preorder the game now on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $49.99.Similar to Sony’s other PC ports, Miles Morales will have a number of PC-specific enhancements. Sony says the game is “fully optimized” for ultrawide monitors, with support for aspect ratios of 21:9, 32:9, and 48:9 (for “triple monitor setups”). You’ll be able to turn on ray-traced reflections and mess with different graphics quality options, and the game supports upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS 3. And if you plug in a DualSense controller, you can take advantage of controller-specific features like differing levels of trigger feedback... Continue reading…

Disney Plus’ convenient feature is an excessively bright intrusion. | Screenshot: Disney Plus Disney Plus, I hate your damn Skip Intro feature, and I wish I could stop its annoying, bright, immersion-breaking icon from popping up at the start of every show. It’s assaulting my eyes every week when I sit down to watch Andor, and I wish there was a way of disabling it. Please, and thank you.The Skip Intro button isn’t new, of course. The feature has been available on Netflix for years and in Disney Plus since its launch in 2019. But its appearance at the start of each episode of Disney’s latest Star Wars TV show is grating on me in a way that it hasn’t with others.Part of it has to do with how prestige-y (sorry) Andor feels. This isn’t She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s comedic riff on legal dramas or WandaVision’s love letter to the... Continue reading…

Amazon’s Prime Day Early Access Sale is over, but there are still plenty of great deals to check out. | Nicholas Barclay / The Verge Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale has come and gone, or so we thought. There are still plenty of solid deals to check out. The roundup that follows is a collection of all the best discounts left standing following the supposed closing of the latest Prime Day event. Many of the deals we’ve highlighted are still matching their best Prime Day prices, while others have rebounded slightly from the discounts we saw over the past couple of days but are still worthy of consideration.We’ll continue to update this list with other great deals that are still valid, giving you a second third chance to cash in on some awesome discounts. If you missed out on a particular product you were hoping to find on sale, don’t worry, as we’ll likely see many of... Continue reading…

Andrea Riseborough as Mrs.Wormwood in Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical. | Image: Netflix Netflix is all in on Roald Dahl after acquiring the rights to the legendary children’s author’s catalog last year. Now, we’re finally getting a sense of what those ambitions will look like with the first trailer for Matilda the Musical. The live-action movie is a key part of Netflix’s holiday plans, and it stars Alisha Weir in the titular lead role along with Lashana Lynch as Miss Honey and Emma Thompson as Miss Trunchbull. It’s based on the 2010 musical adaptation of the original book.Matilda the Musical was created as part of a deal between Sony and Netflix, and the streaming service is also working on a series based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from Thor director Taika Waititi and Phil Johnston, the screenwriter behind Z... Continue reading…

The upcoming OnePlus Nord N300 5G takes its minimalist design cues from the N20, with flat side rails and two prominent rear camera lenses. | Image: OnePlus OnePlus is revealing a few details about its upcoming Nord N300, starting with a spec that’s scarce in the budget class: fast 33W wired charging. Company spokesperson Spenser Blank says that the device is coming to North America next month, where it will follow up the very good OnePlus N200.The company is offering only a few initial details about the N300 right now, and its price tag isn’t one of them. But judging from the N200’s $239 MSRP, it should land comfortably in budget territory. Phones in this sub-$300 price tag rarely include fast charging — in fact, OnePlus’ $299 Nord N20 may very well be the only other one to include it. Heck, that’s faster than most flagship phones: the iPhone 14 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S22, and Pixel 7 Pro all... Continue reading…

Pictured: me after flat-lining several Combine soldiers with a mounted turret. Also pictured: me kind of forgetting that I’m gaming on a Chromebook. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A Chromebook needs more than just an RGB keyboard to be a gaming laptop. It also needs a high-refresh-rate screen and a solid port selection. Now we’re talking. I’ve been testing the $649.99 Acer Chromebook 516 GE, one of a trio of newly announced gaming Chromebooks that my colleague Monica wrote about this week, and I have good news: it does a convincing impression of a gaming laptop, as long as you have fast internet.I’ve been testing a preproduction unit of the 516 GE, and it’s very different from your typical gaming laptop on the inside. There isn’t a high-end processor or graphics card to run the latest games. Instead, it has the fittings of an ultrabook with the necessary connectivity — cutting-edge Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and a... Continue reading…

Vincent Kilbride / The Verge While there has — rightly — been a great deal written and broadcast about how to deal with attacks and privacy violations online and via social media, there is now increasing attention being paid to helping people stay safe in their homes and out in the world.Android phones have, over the last few years, added several personal safety features to their toolboxes. Because the apps and features that come with the phones can differ depending on the manufacturer, what follows are some of the ways you can use the tools offered by Pixel and Samsung phones. If you have an Android phone from a different manufacturer, your best bet is to see what you have that is similar to what comes with either of these phones.Pixel phones come with a Safety... Continue reading…