afternoonbuzz

Baltic Shipwrecks, Indiana Arts, Google, More: Sunday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 7, 2025

NEW RESOURCES

Divernet: War Log maps out 1,000+ Baltic shipwrecks. “A new open-access database called the War Log has been released, recording the many forgotten but often well-preserved historic Swedish warships that sank in storms and battles or were scuttled in the Baltic Sea.”

Indianapolis Public Library: The Indianapolis Public Library Preserves More Than Two Decades of Indiana’s Arts Heritage with Arts Indiana Digitization Project. “Originally launched in 1979 as Arts Insight and concluding publication in 2001 as Arts Indiana, the magazine celebrated and brought together the state’s literary, performing, and visual arts. The Library has digitized more than 200 issues of Arts Indiana and related arts publications, offering a rich snapshot of the state’s creative history.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Search Engine Land: Google’s Year in Search 2025: These trending topics spiked big. “Searches starting with ‘tell me about…’ jumped 70% from 2024 to 2025, while ‘how do I…’ queries hit an all-time high with a 25% year-over-year increase, Google said.”

Tubefilter: The YouTube Shorts algorithm appears to have changed to prioritize newer uploads. “Recently, YouTube Shorts content strategists have noticed a curious trend across channel analytics dashboards. On some channels, viewership of older Shorts has declined precipitously, suggesting that YouTube is tinkering with its recommendation algorithm to favor newer uploads.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

BBC: Failed Sarah Ferguson-backed app received £1m taxpayers’ money. “A lifestyle app backed by Sarah Ferguson received more than £1m of taxpayers’ money but collapsed without ever launching a product, according to documents filed this week.”

Mozilla Blog: Data War goes digital: Firefox’s card game is now online. “Billionaire Blast Off started with a simple premise: send billionaires into space and have fun doing it. With Data War, we created a fun and often chaotic game where you compete to win a one-way ticket to space for a data-hungry billionaire. We were thrilled that so many people at TwitchCon had a blast playing it. You can download your own physical deck of Data War here, and now the chaos comes to your browser. The digital version of Data War is now free to play right online.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Courthouse News Service: Federal judge largely sides with DOJ in finalizing remedy for Google search monopoly. “A federal judge on Friday released the final terms of a remedial plan meant to address tech giant Google’s monopoly over internet search, just over three months after ruling the company can keep major parts of its multitrillion-dollar company.”

ZDNet: Use Google Play? You might get a cash payout from this $700 million settlement soon. “If you made a purchase on the Google Play Store for an app or in-app content between 2016 and 2023, including subscriptions, ad-free upgrades, and game-specific currency, you might be getting some money back as part of a $700 million settlement.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Georgia State University: New Study Explains Why People Fall for Fake News . “Researchers from Georgia State’s Robinson College of Business, Kennesaw State University, and the University of Tennessee have developed a model that explains how emotional cues, rather than accuracy, shape the way we consume and share news on social media.”

University of North Carolina: UNC-Chapel Hill study shows AI can dramatically speed up digitizing natural history collections. “A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, a process known as georeferencing. This task has traditionally been slow, expensive and dependent on significant manual effort. The team found that LLMs can complete this work with near-human accuracy while being significantly faster and more cost-effective.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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