Google is overhauling its mobile search app in honor of the company’s 20th anniversary.
The search engine is about to get more personalized thanks to the new ‘Discover’ feed, which will show users curated content like news, sport highlights and YouTube videos based on user interests and search history when they sign in on the app or desktop site.
The tech giant says Discover and a slew of other new features are aimed at making Google searches smarter and more interactive.
The feed, called Discover, shows users of the official Google mobile app curated content including news, sport highlights and YouTube videos based on user interests when they sign in
Google’s search engine – currently the most used on the web – will become ‘more accessible and useful for people everywhere’ as a result of the updates.
‘…Today we’re sharing new features that help you resume tasks where you left off, keep track of ideas and content that you found useful, and get relevant suggestions of things to explore next,’ Nick Fox, Vice President of Product & Design for Google’s Search and Assistant division, wrote in a blog post.
‘All of this marks a fundamental transformation in the way Search understands interests and longer journeys to help you find information.’
Google first introduced a news feed of trending content last year, but this update will show users more so-called ‘evergreen’ content.
The update will also enable users to edit the types of content shown to them by moving a new slider that appears on cards in the feed up and down, indicating whether users would like to see more or less of this type of content.
Other new features are aimed at helping users carry out what the firm called longer ‘journeys’ in search.
The new ‘Activity Cards’ enable users to retrace search steps through cards that are only to them, which allow them to quickly return to recent searches.
‘Retracing your steps online can be really difficult,’ Fox explained. ‘…Now, a new activity card will help you pick up from where you left off in Search.’
The cards won’t appear for every search; instead, Google ‘intelligently’ shows it when it’s useful.
Collections will help users organize previous searches by topic. From there, Google will offer content suggestions if it notices a pattern in the type of content being saved.
The new Collections tool will appear for users later this fall.
Image and visual searching is also being revamped, as the firm is partnering with open source initiative the AMP Project, which allows anyone to create a social media story-style collection of images and videos and publish them online.
Earlier this year, the firm announced it would showing more AMP stories in Google search results.
The new ‘Activity Cards’ enable users to retrace search steps through cards that are only to them, which allow them to quickly return to recent searches
The feature takes a page from Snapchat and Instagram ‘Stories’ by showing interactive photos and videos with text that usually last no more than 30 seconds or so.
For now, the Stories will mostly be limited to notable people ‘like celebrities and athletes.’
Google Images and the Discover feed will begin to show some of these visual stories going forward, Google said.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will also be used to offer more visual search results, offering featured videos if the search engine finds any it believes are linked to a search.
Google is integrating its AI Lens tool, which helps users identify objects in a photo in the real world.
The announcements are part of the tech giant’s 20th anniversary celebrations, which have been going on throughout September.
Ben Gomes, vice president of Search, News and Assistant at Google, said the aim of the updates was to keeping improving the search engine for the next 20 years.
‘When Google started 20 years ago, our mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ he said.
‘…Fast forward to today, and now we index hundreds of billions of pages in our index – more information than all the libraries in the world could hold. We’ve grown to serve people all over the world, offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries.
‘…Providing greater access to information is fundamental to what we do, and there are always more ways we can help people access the information they need. That’s what pushes us forward to continue to make Search better for our users. And that’s why our work here is never done.’