to celebrate its 20th anniversary google is making a load of changes to search. these changes include making the most out of AI and more advanced search algorithms that will be able to predict what it is that we want. the changes were announced at a small press event in san francisco that reportedly didn’t take any questions from journalists afterward.
images courtesy of google
‘we see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before‘, it reads in a post published by google outlining the future of its search. ‘given this scale, the only way to provide search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. this helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.’
the first change includes a new version of google’s homepage on mobile devices that was actually introduced last year in the search app. google is calling this feature ‘discover’ as it will now surface content and relevant articles based on what google knows about you. it’s all part of a rebranding push around taking users on a ‘journey’ rather than just providing answers.
the search giant will also start displaying a lot more information cards and images, such as those that currently appear at the top of search results giving detailed information about the most relevant results. activity cards will appear at the top of search results that show your previous searches and activity when google decides it would be ‘useful’ to display that content. users can delete individual card entries. google will also give the option to save your own searches into ‘collections‘ for future reference.
‘featured video’ cards will also pop up, offering content related to video-related searches. auto-play options will be optional incase this proves annoying. another form of card will be ‘enhanced topics,’ a feature offering additional tabs of information on a common topic allows users to narrow down their search. if a user searched for ‘pug’ some examples of ready-to-scroll info would include ‘buy or adopt,’ ‘names’ and ‘how to train.’
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Given concerns about privacy, Google’s move seems very much against current popular desires, as exemplified in the other two comments. This posting almost seems like a spoof or attempted sabotage by Google’s competition.
I was hoping against hope that Google had decided to change how it worked by no longer being evil, stopping kow towing to the Communist Chinese government, and stopping gathering data from its consumers without their explicit consent.
No. Just No. When I search for a string of words, I don’t want somebody (or AI) to decide what I wanted to see. Give me my darn results and I (thinking human being that I am) will sort through it to find what I’m after. Will this be the end of my Google searches? Stay tuned…