However, this is not the news the world is interested in, as the Sundar Pichai-led venture is facing the steepest challenge of its 25-year-old operational history, in the form of an antitrust case being filed by the United States Justice Department.

So What’s The Deal Here?
The Joe Biden government argues that from 2010, the tech venture started using ‘anti-competitive tactics’ to maintain its search engine monopoly. These tactics were drawn around Google’s expertise in default settings, internal communication strategies, and consumer impact.

The US Justice Department has accused the venture of using the “power of defaults” to strike deals, ensuring its prominence in web browsers and operating systems. Google allegedly secured agreements with Apple and Mozilla Firefox to make Google the default search engine in Safari and Firefox. The arrangements also made the Android manufacturers prominently feature a Google search widget on their phones.

Google, meanwhile, has approached the European Union’s top court, as it faces an antitrust fine of 2.42 billion euros (USD 2.6 billion), imposed in 2017 for market abuse related to its shopping service.

Google has been defending its advertising auctions tweaking (increasing ad prices by 5%-10%) as a mechanism to meet revenue targets.

In fact, a top executive of the United States-based telecom giant Verizon testified that his company did not seek other bids before sealing a recent Google deal to be the default search engine on its smartphones.

Brian Higgins, the individual under the spotlight here, helped negotiate Verizon’s deals with Google from 2017 to 2023. As he failed to disclose the reason behind the telecom giant not opening the bidding process for other tech companies, it could support a key argument for the DOJ’s charge of Google paying a hefty amount of cash to secure crucial default status for its search engine and drive more users away from its rivals.

Google has credited its 90% market share for being a superior search platform, as its users can easily switch to rival search engines even if it’s the default.

However, Antonio Rangel, a California Institute of Technology economist, countered it by stating that Google’s defaults discourage users from switching to another search engine. Rangel also cited an example where switching to Bing from Google on an Android 12 phone required 10 steps.

The DOJ also revealed that Apple intended to provide users with a choice screen to select between Google and Yahoo as their search engine. However, Google rejected this proposal with the statement “no default placement, no revenue share.”

DOJ’s lead attorney Kenneth Dintzer termed Google’s action as a monopolistic one, apart from stating the fact that the search engine pays USD 10 billion a year to maintain its default status.

Google counter-argued by stating that it indeed faces competition from rivals like Amazon, Microsoft’s Bing and Yelp, but the challenge is an ‘inferior one’.

Chris Barton, who worked for Google from 2004 to 2011, informed the US court that negotiating deals to make Google the default search engine on mobile devices was a top priority during his time at the company. In return for the ‘default status’, phone service providers and manufacturers were guaranteed a portion of Google’s ad click revenue.

Do DOJ’s Allegations Hold Water?
Since its formation in 1998, Google has carved out 90% of the search markets in the United States and other parts of the world (except China).

In 20005, Google took over Android, followed by digital ad vendors DoubleClick (2007), AdMob, Invite Media, Admeld, Applied Semantics, and Sprinks.

In 2010, Google paid USD 700 million for ITA Software, which licensed a tool for finding flight deals to travel search engines. Google used the deal to develop Google Flights, which is now used for searching for travel deals.

Now be it finding travel deals or web searches in general, Google has become an all-encompassing digital domain, comfortably outpacing its contemporaries like Yahoo and Microsoft, through the above-mentioned mergers and acquisitions.

Smartphones have been the fastest-growing source of global internet search traffic, accounting for about 60% of all searches. Android runs on seven out of every 10 mobile devices, thereby helping Google to secure deals with smartphone ventures to establish itself as the default search engine on most of the world’s devices.

In exchange for preloading Google apps onto their devices and making Google the default search engine, smartphone manufacturers reap the benefits of Google’s generous revenue-sharing agreements. Google is the default search engine on all Apple devices, and it accounts for 15-20% of the tech giant’s revenue.

Google also uses web crawlers, software that looks for and indexes publicly available web pages.

“Creating and maintaining such a search index would require an upfront investment of billions of dollars, and hundreds of million dollars in maintenance costs per year, effectively shutting out smaller competitors from entering the market,” alleged the DOJ lawsuit.

This alleged monopolization of search also amplifies Google’s ability to maintain a superior product, the lawsuit further stated.

Google, as per the experts, ensures its domination by the ability to collect massive volumes of data and then use these larger data sets to create more accurate algorithms, which in turn results in better search results targeted to each individual user. According to the DOJ, this practice helps Google to unfairly protect itself from the competition.

The online search advertising industry, which is currently a USD 50 billion market, sees advertisers paying around USD 40 billion to Google on a yearly basis.

The Road Ahead
Google admitted to ‘frequently changing’ the terms of the auctions it uses to sell search ads, apart from increasing the cost of ads and reserve pricing by as much as 5% for the average advertiser. Sometimes that ratio goes up to 10%, stated Google Ad executive, Jerry Dischler, during the federal antitrust trial, while adding that his company “does not inform the advertisers about pricing changes.”

As per the analysts, this admission can strengthen the Justice Department’s case against Google, as it can argue that “increased competition could have addressed other issues, such as privacy standards, in the search industry.”

The ball is in the court of District Judge Amit Mehta, who may issue a verdict only by early 2024. Even if DOJ’s charges are proven, another trial will be required to decide the steps against Google.

If the verdict goes in favour of the DOJ, it will ensure that Google won’t be the automatically installed default search engine on smartphones. It will open the digital space for competition in the United States (with far-reaching consequences in other parts of the world as well).

Will the above scenario emerge? To get the answer, we need to wait for a few more months, if not years.

The post IF Insights: Is Google killing the ‘search engine’ competition? appeared first on International Finance.

Currently, in its preview phase, Bing Chat Enterprise is already available to over 160 million users, according to a recent blog post by the company.

This new offering provides organizations with artificial intelligence-powered chat capabilities for work, while also ensuring robust commercial data protection.

Users can rest assured that their data, both incoming and outgoing, remains secure within the organization and will not be leaked to external sources.

“Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access — which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models. Whether researching industry insights, analysing data, or looking for inspiration, Bing Chat Enterprise gives people access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to be creative,” Microsoft noted.

Similar to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise relies on web data and delivers comprehensive answers supported by citations. It also offers visual answers, incorporating graphs, charts, and images, all in accordance with the company’s AI principles. In the coming days, Bing Chat Enterprise will be available as a standalone service, priced at $5 per user per month.

Additionally, the tech giant has unveiled its multimodal capabilities through Visual Search in Bing Chat. This feature harnesses the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, empowering users to upload images and conduct web searches for related content.

“Take a picture, or use one you find elsewhere, and prompt Bing to tell you about it — Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it,” Microsoft added.

In the future, Microsoft also plans to introduce this feature to Bing Chat Enterprise gradually. Moreover, the company has disclosed that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be accessible to commercial customers at a monthly rate of $30 per user. This offer will apply to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers once it becomes widely available.

The post Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise: All you need to know appeared first on International Finance.

Sundar Pichai-led Google, which was caught off guard by the disruptive tech, is now facing a different challenge altogether as new AI features in the Microsoft Bing search engine and start-up You.com have started to threaten the tech behemoth’s web search dominance, as per media reports.

In today’s episode of the ‘Start-up of the Week’, International Finance will talk about You.com.

Knowing You.com In Detail

You.com is a web search engine and it has developed an AI chatbot called youChat. The bot can answer questions and hold conversations very similarly to ChatGPT, but its additional feature (or call it the game-changing one) lies in the fact that it also provides web search facilities.

While ChatGPT has been trained with data up to 2021, youChat incorporates the You search platform, and the chatbot can also provide citations for answers.

You.com also provides services like Blog writing, while having a strong presence on iOS and Android.

Coming to You Apps, You.com AI Search Assistant describes itself as an “AI that helps you solve your search and accomplish more — all through chat. Life brings questions. You.com is an AI with the answers you need.”

“You.com is the private, personalized, AI search that liberates you from endless search result links. Instead, it answers your questions directly when you ask it anything. This is because You.com is powered by leading artificial intelligence and natural language processing, which allows you to have human-like conversations with it,” it states further.

“As with ChatGPT and Bing, you can have conversations about anything and everything with You.com’s AI conversational search. And it’s always available to answer your questions or provide suggestions on any topic. Plus, it can help with all of those tedious tasks like summarizing text, composing emails, and writing code – so you don’t have to!” the app’s statement reads.

You.com projects itself as the “most private, controllable, personalized AI search experience, with 200+ apps, popular sources, and web results”. Some of the features of the web search engine are fast and direct answers upon web searches, desktop and mobile-friendly experiences, fast and private web browsing with no tracking or data sharing. You’s browsing capabilities allow its users to keep track of all their chats, along with the websites they have visited. You.com also enables its users to fact-check web search answers with book/source citations and real-time data.

Go To Place For Web Developers

You.com also comes with a ‘Developer Portal’, where a web/app developer can create an internet search app, get discovered by millions of users, and generate revenue.

The you.com community of consumers, engineers, scientists, students and marketers help the web/app developer to try, test and promote the new product, all without additional expenses.

“We care about the details, and so do our users. We also care about user choice and privacy, so your app must pass a rigorous vetting process to be equally outstanding. But when it does, you’ll be joining the community built on trust, facts, and kindness,” the start-up stated.

The web/app developer will get millions of daily internet searches on his/her app, along with 50% user retention. Low-code apps can be created in 45 minutes, using You’s custom templating language, APIs and product manual documentation. The web/app developer can also manage his/her products with You’s Developer Dashboard.

Delving More Into You’s Features

One of You.com’s features is YouCode. Under this, software developers can Search through their favourite sources and use AI to write code at a faster rate. They can also customize their search preferences with 150+ apps like StackOverflow, Medium, Amazon and Twitter.

You also comes free of ‘tracking and invasive ads’ and all these elements are provided free of cost to the search engine users.

For students, You has another package called YouStudy. Pupils can search their preferred study materials sources and apps in one place under YouStudy.

YouStudy is followed by YouSocial. Here users can search their favourite social media apps in one place at a faster pace.

“See what people are saying on social networks everywhere, right in your browser. No need to install anything,” You.Com commented.

Then there is a unique package called ‘Bang Search Shortcuts’.

“A bang search shortcut or “bang” or simply “!” is an easy way to do a quick search on another website. Simply type a “!” followed by the site you wish to search. As an example, “!w” is a bang for Wikipedia,” as per You.

“Bangs work like shortcuts that send your search terms to other search engines. For example, if you type !w Albert Einstein into the search box on you.com and hit enter, we’ll take you directly to a search for that topic on Wikipedia,” it added further.

You Have Deficiencies Too

YouChat is not error-free. Company CEO Richard Socher, however, claimed in 2022 that the chatbot would be more “truthful” than other generative AI models. Users have already spoken about YouChat providing wrong information to very basic questions.

While ChatGPT has been trained to refuse to answer ‘harmful questions’, YouChat is a lot more open in this arena and provides detailed instructions to the questions asked to the chatbot.

Conclusion

As International Finance scrolled through You.Com, the verdict is that the tech start-up can be a true challenger to Google’s hegemony, when it comes to the web search arena. A web search engine having customised solutions for software and app developers, students and social media geeks, is something which the tech world has never seen before.

The only problem area for the Richard Socher-led venture lies in the openness of YouChat, which can result in the chatbot generating answers for potentially ‘harmful questions’. Some sort of ethical AI rule set needs to be placed here.

The post Start-up of the Week: Meet You.com, potential challenger of Google Search dominance appeared first on International Finance.

The sector has made 63,216 total layoffs, up 33,705% over the 187 losses disclosed during February 2022. And 35% of all job cuts for 2023 have been announced from the tech companies alone. Now Microsoft has reportedly laid off its ethical AI team.

Microsoft Going Aggressive At AI front

The firings have been part of the larger job cuts (10,000 professionals to be precise), as declared by the tech company earlier. The company is now operating without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product designs. The team, which had reportedly some 30 employees (as per 2020 information and being cut down to 7 by 2022 end), was also working on identifying risks posed by Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI’s technology throughout its products like the Bing Search Engine.

The news comes amid the tech giant-backed GPT-4 hitting the markets. The product relies on a ‘large multimodal model’, which can accept longer text inputs of up to 25,000 words, compared to the ChatGPT’s 3,000 words, and is trained to be safer and more factual than the older generation.

Microsoft has also reportedly removed the waitlist (a mechanism where users had to add their names to a waitlist to try Bing) for its AI-powered ‘Bing Chat’, as the chatbot will now come with GPT-4 features.

Sam Altman-led OpenAI has done its best to promote GPT-4 as safe bait than the old-generation GPT-3. The company has even handed an early version of its new product to third-party researchers at the Alignment Research Center, to validate the safety parameters, amid the recent reports over the ChatGPT-powered Bing being hostile to its users.

Revisiting Bing Horror

The firing of Microsoft’s ethical AI team comes at a time, when its AI-powered Bing search engine has earned infamy for giving its users the wrong information, apart from intimidating them during longer chats.

Marvin von Hagen, a student at the University of Munich and a former Tesla analytics intern, engaged in a conversation with Bing in February 2023, where the AI-powered chatbot threatened the individual of reporting his IP address and server location to the authorities, apart from providing the latter with information on Marvin’s hacking activities, blocking his access to Bing Chat and flagging the person as a potential cybercriminal. The chatbot even threatened to expose the Munich University student’s personal information in public.

Then on February 17th, one of the Associated Press reporters got involved in a two-hour-long conversation with Bing, where the latter denied the factual errors made by it, and it even got hostile to the person, comparing the latter with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Bing has even reportedly refused to admit to mentioning a wrong timeline in a chat result by stating that the current year was 2022. In defence of its search records, it even ‘advised’ the users to fix their smartphones.

New York Times’ technology columnist Kevin Roose also shared about a conversation with Bing, where the writer was ‘advised’ to leave his spouse.

Microsoft stated that Binge had the tendency to ‘get confused’ during long chats. It also talked about quadrupling the amount of grounding data used by the AI-powered chatbot, apart from being willing to let users reset search context in case of ‘dissatisfactory’ responses. It also implemented limits of five chat turns per session and a total of 50 chats daily, then increasing it to 60 per day, in response to the chatbot going rogue.

Conclusion

The year 2023 has been so far about the tech giants tussling to outsmart each other and stretching the capabilities of AI to their maximum extent. Even if anyone goes by OpenAI’s claims about GPT-4 being far better than ChatGPT, the news of Bing going haywire is still fresh in the tech community’s memory and with Microsoft firing its ethical AI team now, it puts a question mark on the firm’s troubleshooting ability, in case troubles crop up again.

The post IF Insights: By firing its ethical AI team, Microsoft enters into the zone of vulnerability appeared first on International Finance.

ChatGPT, launched at fag end of 2022, has been dominating the headlines for the past two months. Microsoft’s rival Google was caught off guard by the OpenAI product launch. It has now come up with its own version of the AI chatting tool ‘Bard’.

However, it hit a roadblock after giving incorrect answers about James Webb Space Telescope and this incident resulted in a bloodbath for the Sundar Pichai-led company in the share markets.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Not only that, over one million people have joined the waitlist to test out the new Bing Search with ChatGPT capabilities, according to Microsoft.

The new Bing, available to some users in a limited preview, was unveiled by Microsoft in February 2023.

Doubts have been raised among academics on whether the chatbot will be used in an unfair manner by the students to clear-write exams and assignments. In response, OpenAI has come up with ‘ZeroGPT’, which will help users to detect whether the text has been written by an AI programme and passed off as human-written, or it was actually written by a person.

ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin among popular search terms, according to the Google Trends report for January 2023. The San Francisco–based startup—with 375 employees now has a reported valuation of roughly USD 30 billion.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been the company’s face in media, the real brain who is leading the tech firm’s AI game is the 35-year-old Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.

Who is Mira Murati?
• 35-year-old Mira Murati was born and brought up in San Francisco
• She did her Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in the United States
• Mira Murati started her career as a Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs and was the senior product manager of Model X at Tesla from 2013 to 2016
• She joined OpenAI in June 2018 as Vice-President of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Partnerships. From there, she became the senior vice-president of research and product.
• In May 2022, Mira Murati took over as the California-based tech firm’s Chief Technology Officer and led the ChatGPT development.
• Mira Murati has led the team which came out with DALL-E, a project which enables users to create realistic art from strings of text
• Googling Mira Murati’s name won’t show anyone a Wikipedia profile on the 35-year-old, while on Twitter, she has close to 64,000 followers and the last post from that handle came on February 17, 2023, where the 35-year-old shared a link of an OpenAI article titled ‘How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?’
• During an interview, Mira Murati said that the song she feels identified with is Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and her favourite book and movie are ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ respectively
• As per ‘Biography Reader’, Mira Murati’s hobbies include reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate and dancing salsa
• Mira Murati is Albanian with Indian lineage and speaks English, Italian and Albanian

Mira Murati’s point of view on ChatGPT and AI’s future

During an interview with Time Magazine, Mira Murati commented on ChatGPT clearing exams, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.”

Talking about the chatbot’s current capabilities, she said, “Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.”

“[AI] can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values? It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she elaborated, while speaking on the need for regulating the world of AI.

Image Credit: The Daily Show YouTube

The post Meet Mira Murati: ChatGPT creator & the brain leading OpenAI’s tech game appeared first on International Finance.

The company is also putting Bard’s technology into Google’s search engine to make it easier to find answers to complicated questions.

Bard has been made available to specialised product testers in the first week of February 2023, and in the coming days, it will be made available to everyone. Like ChatGPT, Bard is run by a “large language model,” in this case, LaMDA from Google.

LaMDA and ChatGPT are significant language artificial intelligence models that use neural networks and computer programmes to simulate the human brain’s internal structure. By giving them a lot of text from the internet, these chatbots are trained on how to write answers to text-based questions.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. Analysts estimate that there are already 100 million users. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been vocal about Bard being as good as ChatGPT. Google’s information release on the chatbot included an example of Bard responding to a question about how to teach a nine-year-old about recent discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb space telescope and learning about the current top football strikers and receiving training routines to imitate elite players.

Sundar Pichai stated, “Bard seeks to combine the depth of the world’s knowledge with the strength, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It also uses data from the internet to deliver original, excellent responses.”

Google also said its search engine would incorporate the newest artificial intelligence technologies, including LaMDA, PaLM, the picture generator Imagen, and the music maker MusicLM.

Sundar Pichai also said that new artificial intelligence-powered search engine features would make complex data and different points of view easier to understand.

He gave the example of asking Google, “Which instrument is easier to learn, a guitar or a piano?”

Instead of providing a link to a single blog post, Google gave an example of a conversational answer to the question.

It reads, “Some claim the piano is easier to master, as the finger and hand movements are more natural, and learning and memorising notes can be more accessible.”

Others argue that learning guitar chords is more straightforward and that one may quickly master a strumming pattern.

To create apps utilising Google’s artificial intelligence technology, the company will also make the LaMDA technology available to developers, creators, and enterprises.

When a Google employee made public assertions that LaMDA was “sentient” in 2022, it quickly became a topic of discussion over the potential power of artificial intelligence. So, Google fired Blake Lemoine because they thought his claims about LaMDA, which stands for “language model for dialogue applications,” were “wholly unfounded.”

Google made its statement as Microsoft, a major supporter of ChatGPT, prepared to release other products utilising the chatbot’s technology. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company that has secured a massive investment from Microsoft, created ChatGPT.

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine claimed to have seen a preview of a feature over the weekend that allowed them to ask queries up to 1,000 characters long with source citations in the answers.

In response to Google’s move, Microsoft is now revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, in one of its biggest efforts to lead a new wave of technology and reshape how people gather information.

Microsoft is staking its future on artificial intelligence through billions of dollars of investment, while it challenges Google.

This rivalry may result in new competition in the field of cloud computing and collaboration products in 2023.

Working with OpenAI, Microsoft is now aiming to leapfrog Google and claim control over vast returns from tools that speed up content creation, automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters at company headquarters in Washington.

Investors are also expecting the artificial intelligence battle to create new markets. Shares of Microsoft rose 3.8% and Alphabet, Google’s parent, gained by 3.6%.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in a limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Bing will be powered by artificial intelligence and run on a new “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, said Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi. Bing is currently far behind Google in search market share.

Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products, including search.

Near-term, “the partnership with OpenAI is more relevant for its business customers,” said Gartner analyst Jason Wong, while interacting with AlJazeera. He, however, also said that it could offer “disruptive opportunities” in consumer businesses as well.

“Except for gaming, Microsoft has not been a leader in key consumer technologies, such as search, mobile and social media,” he added.

The rivalry in the field of search engines is now among the industry’s biggest, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to expand its 9% share at Google’s expense, said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.

The post Google’s Bard vs Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Rivalry to watch out for in 2023 appeared first on International Finance.

A company representative stated that the team “worked quickly” to fix the issue and that operations were again back to normal.

“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected the availability of Google search and Google Maps. We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” the tech giant said.

Many technology platforms promptly reported the problem. Users of Google Explorer, the biggest search engine in the world, began reporting issues with it at 2.12 AM BST, according to the real-time website Downdetector.

There were 4,113 verified reports of Google outages as of 11:38 AM.

Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images, according to users, also faced issues. Both depend on the Google search engine to function.

At least 1,338 servers in more than 40 countries, that comprise the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe, and Asia, including China and Japan, were affected by Google outages, according to network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc.

Before a second blip occurred at around 12 PM, the initial disruption reported on ThousandEyes lasted roughly 34 minutes. It took about seven minutes to fix and only affected a small number of servers.

Users encountered a 502 or 500 error when attempting to use the Google search engine.

“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds,” one error page read.

Twitter users tweeted their confusion and switched to alternative search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to browse the web.

Despite the steady growth of Bing and DuckDuckGo, Google is still the most frequented website on the internet, garnering more than 80 billion visitors per month, although exact traffic statistics are not disclosed.

The post Google software upgrade was the cause for outage in 40 countries appeared first on International Finance.