Siri and Cortana watch out! Amazon has decided to give developers access to Alexa, its cloud-based voice assistant, as it chases a bigger slice of that particular market. Amazon is keen to expand the reach of Alexa beyond the company’s own Amazon Echo device. Kindle users, for instance, may soon be able to turn from one page of content to another on the device without even having to touch it.

Tech insiders might be familiar with the term “fat finger syndrome”, but for those not in the know, it refers to touchscreen clicks that occur by accident. Google is eager to reduce the number of accidental clicks.

Yahoo has signed a partnership deal with software giant Oracle as it looks to increase its share of the search market. Under the deal, Yahoo is to be linked into new installations of Oracle’s popular programming language software, Java.

Social media platform Instagram has announced two major updates: a new Explore page and improved search functionality. The photo and video-sharing app used its own blog to make the announcements.

It appears that Google’s latest update to their core algorithm is proving to be quite the boost for news sites or sites providing fresh content. This has to represent good news for website copywriting services that are keeping on top of their game in terms of fresh and relevant work.

News stories on television and in the early years of online have traditionally meant elaborate video production, but user-generated video is becoming increasingly important in the coverage of breaking news stories, and Google has responded with new features to support eyewitness news videos uploaded onto YouTube. Google has owned the popular video site since a 2006 buyout. The popularity of user-generated and other news content on YouTube is reflected in figures showing that more than 5 million hours of news videos are watched on the site every day.

Bing has been busy. Not content with turning itself into one of the most advanced search engines available in respect of image search, the Microsoft-owned Bing has now turned its attention to making improvements to its video search functionality.

What to make of the latest move by Twitter to use its messaging platform to facilitate shopping? The social media platform said on 18th June that it had begun testing a new system that would be promoting both “products and places” in its feeds.

Google took to its official blog on 17th June to announce updates to Google Trends. The announced changes include the introduction of minute-by-minute data in real time, a refreshed homepage, and the integration of YouTube and Google News data. The latter update is aimed at better determining trending topics. Taken together, the changes represent the most comprehensive update by Google Trends since 2012.

Search engine Bing is to start encrypting searches using Transport Layer Security (TLS) as part of a broader move by Bing owner Microsoft to expand encryption within its network and service offerings. What this means for users of Bing is that rather than seeing referrals coming from http://www.bing.com, they will see them originating from https://www.bing.com. Bing rolled out the option for encrypting search traffic around a year and a half ago.