A jarring headline for an opinion piece running in the Wall Street Journal might take some readers off guard. The title--Google's Anti-Pentagon Decision Will Kill More People--pretty much says it all. Precision is the focus on the article and the focus of why Google employees signed and addresses a letter to Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai demanding the company stop work on the Defense Department’s Project Maven, which applies algorithms to warfare. The author believes it's "naive to think war is obsolete—bad actors will always be around. But technology will soon surgically zap bad guys. Project Maven gets us closer," …

Alphabet's second quarter 2018 earnings report provided lots of insight into ways it's investing in the company's future. Some of those investments include businesses that grow at a rapid pace and require sizable compute needs, most notably Cloud, anything mobile, and ways to gain foot traffic into stores from the web. One of the numbers, per the Motley Fool, that's difficult to overlook: $5.5 billion in capital expenditures, up 93% year over year. Daniel Sparks explains why.

Google has begun marking HTTP sites as not secure. The changes connected with Chrome browser users began on Monday. When a website loads in the Chrome browser using an HTTP connection, it means the site is not encrypted and anyone on the network can look at any information going back and forth, or even modify the contents of the site before it gets to the user. Google now identifies those sites with a "not secure" tag.

As it pushes toward an IPO, Pinterest is nearing $1 billion in ad revenue, reports USA Today, citing people familiar with the matter. It appears that the social site found its "footing" by combining social and search ads into one platform. There is still room to grow. The site has not focused on video ads and has not proved to "physical retailers that its visual search capabilities can drive traffic into stores."

Digital Asset, which provides distributed ledger solutions, has announced a partnership with Google Cloud services. The partnership will “provide developers with a full stack solution so they can unleash the potential for web-paced innovation in blockchain.” The software is set for a 2019 release.

Google introduced Move Mirror in a blog post this week that highlights an experiment in search and artificial intelligence. The computer vision technology matches human poses in front of a web camera with images of other people in the same pose online. Google used PoseNet technology to build the platform. It's powered by Tensorflow.is, a library that runs machine learning modeling. 

Duck Duck Go in several tweets on Twitter slammed Google for their anti-competitive search behavior, suggesting the antitrust issues are not limited to the Android OS. "Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension," wrote the search engine in a tweet on their Twitter account. The Verge explains.

Google took its cloud platform to Southern California, making Los Angeles, the hub for entertainment and media companies, the newest location to house its services. The Los Angeles cloud region is one among five across the United States. About 17 total worldwide.

Christi Olson runs through four tactics that retailers need to know, and how to make them actionable in search. For example, being there, ready and convenient might mean building a chatbot and having it available in the search results to answer any questions those searching for information might have. Getting more personal in search might also mean using remarketing lists for search ads and custom audiences on top of your existing paid search campaigns. Olson explains.

Reuters reports that Google is set to face a record EU antitrust fine Wednesday for its Android mobile operating system. The EU penalty is likely to exceed the 2017 fine. The report suggests Google forces smartphone makers to "pre-install Google Search together with its Play Store and Chrome browser, sign agreements not to sell devices on rival Android systems and also pay smartphone makers to only pre-install Google Search on devices."