Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $56.2 billion and increased 8% (up 10% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $24.3 billion and increased 18% (up 21% in constant currency)
• Net income was $20.1 billion and increased 20% (up 23% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.69 and increased 21% (up 23% in constant currency)

"Organizations are asking not only how - but how fast - they can apply this next generation of AI to address the biggest opportunities and challenges they face - safely and responsibly," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We remain focused on leading the new AI platform shift, helping customers use the Microsoft Cloud to get the most value out of their digital spend, and driving operating leverage."

Store Quick-Search now includes developer pages and tags, also it will be better at handling of misspelled words. Today, we rolled out an update to the Steam store search to add more ways for players to search. Recently we've noticed more players searching for particular store hubs, tags, or developers so we've updated Steam store search to handle those destinations. For these new results, we'll show a new format with a subtle background generated from images of the most popular games in that result. Let's take a quick look at all the recent search updates...

Search for Developers, Publishers, and Franchises
Additionally, players can now search directly for your developer or publisher if you have set up a homepage. For more about developer and publisher homepages, please see: partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/creator_homepage. Looking for a particular developer or publisher on Steam? Excited about a specific gaming franchise? Now those appear in the quick search results too. Looking for "Bethesda" games? Or perhaps you want to browse all the "Star Wars" or "Final Fantasy" games. Now you can!

The 43rd edition of the Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, held annually in Kyoto Japan, is charting the way forward for the devices of the future. Held between June 11-16, 2023, this year's symposium will see structured presentations, Q&A, and discussions on some of the biggest technological developments in the logic chip world. The lead (plenary) sessions drop a major hint on the way the wind is blowing. Leadning from the front is an address by Suraya Bhattacharya, Director, System-in-Package, A*STAR, IME, on "Multi-Chiplet Heterogeneous Integration Packaging for Semiconductor System Scaling."

Companies such as AMD and Intel read the tea-leaves, that Moore's Law is buckling, and it's no longer economically feasible to build large monolithic processors at the kind of prices they commanded a decade ago. This has caused companies to ration their allocation of the latest foundry node to only the specific components of their chip design that benefit the most from the latest node, and identify components that don't benefit as much, and disintegrate them into separate dies build on older foundry nodes, which are then connected through innovative packaging technologies.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended March 31, 2023, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $52.9 billion and increased 7% (up 10% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $22.4 billion and increased 10% (up 15% in constant currency)
• Net income was $18.3 billion and increased 9% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.45 and increased 10% (up 14% in constant currency)

"The world's most advanced AI models are coming together with the world's most universal user interface - natural language - to create a new era of computing," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "Across the Microsoft Cloud, we are the platform of choice to help customers get the most value out of their digital spend and innovate for this next generation of AI."

Google's business of providing the world's largest search engine is reportedly in jeopardy, as the latest reports indicate that Samsung could replace Google Search with another search engine as a default solution on its mobile devices. Samsung, which sells millions of devices per year, is looking to replace the current search engine, Google Search, in favor of more modern AI-powered models. Currently, Google and Samsung have a contract where Google pays the South Korean giant a sum of three billion US dollars per year to keep its search engine as a default option on Samsung's devices. However, this decision is flexible, as the contract is up for renewal and new terms are being negotiated.

With the release of the ChatGPT and AI-powered search that Microsoft Bing enables, Google is reportedly working hard to keep up and integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into Search. Google's answer to Microsoft Bing is codenamed Project Magi, an initiative to bring AI-powered search supposedly next month. To emphasize the importance of getting this to production, Google was ready to give up three billion US Dollars of revenue to Samsung for keeping Google Search as a default search engine for 12 years without a doubt. However, with the emergence of better solutions like Microsoft Bing, Samsung is considering replacing it with something else. The deal is still open, terms are still negotiated, and for now there are no official mentions of Bing. As a reminder, Google has a similar agreement with Apple, worth 20 billion US Dollars, and Google Search was valued at 162 billion US Dollars last year.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo search engine has seen tremendous growth recently surpassing 100 million daily searches on January 11th 2021. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from competing search engines by not customizing ads to a specific user instead showing ads purely based on the search term. Since DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008 they have grown from processing 100,000 searches a day to now over 100 million searches daily. For comparison, Google processes roughly 5.5 billion searches a day and Bing 200 million so while DuckDuckGo still has a long way to go to becoming a household name they have made remarkable progress. This latest round of growth can be attributed to the upcoming WhatsApp privacy policy changes which have reminded consumers of the importance of internet privacy and security.

In the past few years, Google has been paying Apple billions of dollars just for the company to keep Google as the default search engine in every aspect of the company's products. Starting from iOS up to macOS, they included Google as the default search engine. However, the deal between two companies might be coming to an end. In July this year, a UK Competition and Markets Authority took a shot at a deal claiming that the companies imposed a barrier on any market competition in the search engine space. Constant pressure from regulators and the fact that Apple doesn't want to be reliant on any company is possibly giving Apple ideas to launch its own search engine.

Recent changes in the spotlight search on iOS 14 and iPad OS 14 beta is making the software bypass Google search engine completely. As shown below (search and direct results), the company implemented a feature that makes the spotlight search go directly to search results instead of going to Google. The Applebot web crawler has seen some changes so it now renders pages in a similar way Google does and not just filter HTML. The web crawler also is updated to rank web pages just like it is made for a search engine. All of this is supposed to give Apple enough material so it can build something similar to a search engine. It is believed that the search engine wouldn't look like any classical one, but rather be embedded in Apple products and serve as a personalized search hub.

According to the latest report by Windows Latest, Microsoft's Windows 10 2004 May update will bring a much-needed disk performance update. The underlying reason behind this improvement is the terrible performance of the Windows Search indexer, which in previous versions of Windows 10 had high disk usage and resulted in a slowdown of the system. However, Microsoft decided to improve that and found a way to optimize its performance. This improvement will be of much need to everyone who owns and runs Windows 10 on a Hard Drive.

In Windows 10 update 1909, Microsoft has decided to separate Cortana from the Windows Search and thus brought disk usage a bit lower. However, Microsoft's engineers have been fine-tuning the Search Indexer, and now the performance is significantly better while having a lot less disk usage. Previously, the Search Indexer was very aggressive and spared no resources for its process, so this is a welcome addition. This improvement will leave disk usage capacity to other processes and will result in a noticeably snappier system, which Hard Drive users will appreciate the most.

Google Tuesday announced that it is discontinuing YouTube on Amazon's home entertainment platforms Fire TV and Echo Show. YouTube is the world's most popular on-demand video service, and continues to be the largest video sharing site. In a statement, Google said that the decision to pull YouTube from Amazon platforms was in reciprocity to Amazon continuing to hamper sales of Google devices, and preventing Amazon Prime Video from working on Google Chromecast. "Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make (its) Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of (our sister company) Nest's latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and Fire TV," Google said.

As if preventing Prime Video from working on Chromecast doesn't amount to "selectively blocking customer access to an open website," a hypocritical Amazon retorted "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website." Google has, in its statement, left the door open for a possible agreement between the two. "We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon," Google stated. This could likely see Google devices such as Chromecast and Google Home return to Amazon, and the availability of Prime Video on Chromecast and other Google Cast platforms. If it gets any worse from here on, Google has another, more destructive weapon in its arsenal against Amazon - Search results.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.3 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.

According to comScore, the month of January has seen all major players in the US Internet search market keep the positions held at the end of 2012. Still, there have been small changes as Google increased its share to 66.2% (66.1% in the previous month) while Yahoo dropped a little, from 16.2% in December to 16.0%.

Following Google and Yahoo was Microsoft with a 13.8% market share, while on the fourth and fifth places in January's top we have Ask and AOL with 2.6% and 1.4%, respectively. Almost 20 billion core search queries were conducted in the US in January.