Google Announces Massive Search Update

Google is making massive improvements to Search, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the company. The company is announcing major changes to the Search experience, which will be rolled out gradually. Here’s what’s new.

Discover

Google’s feed now has a name: Discover. Google is making improvements to its personalised feed and giving it a name as part of the latest update. The update revolves around topics, allowing you to distinguish between all the different topics Google thinks you are interested in based on your search history. The company is even adding new types of content to the feed, including things like videos.

But there’s a change: instead of only showing you recent content, Google will now show you older content from the web that might be relevant to you now. So for example, if you are going on a trip to India, Google may display an article from 2 months ago about the touristy places in the country. The company is now giving users more control over their feed, too, with options to see more or less content from a certain topic, as well as support for multiple languages.

And then there is the huge change: Discover is coming to Google.com on mobile devices. Yes, Google will now have a news feed for all mobile users on Google.com. It’s a significant change from the company, and it’s only a matter of time till Discover makes it way to the desktop.

Google Images, Google Lens, Stories

Google is giving visual content a huge push on Search. The company now uses AI to create Stories that automatically takes content from around the web and turns it into a Story that users can view from within Search, much like Snapchat Stories. The feature is only starting off with notable people and celebrities, but it will likely expand to other topics in the future. The update introduces new featured videos for search results, too.

Google is even updating Google Images today. The company has apparently overhauled the Google Images algorithm to rank results with great images and content while prioritizing fresher content at the same time. The update will also display more information around images, helping you find the perfect image you need.

To give Google Images some superpowers, Google is bringing Google Lens to Images. This means you can now use Lens’ intelligence to find more information about pictures on Google Images which is going to be really useful.

Google Gets Pinterest-y

Google is adding some other features to help users keep track of their searches. There’s a new activity cards feature that will show you your previous searches, or the sites you visited during a search when you repeat the same search. You will be able to remove results from the activity card if you are concerned about your privacy, too.

And then there’s the new Collections feature: it essentially lets you make a collection of different search results, and bookmark them into different categories. You can also add sites from the activity cards to your collections which is pretty handy.

Google’s new updates to Search are quite major. The updated Discover, combined with updates to Google Images and Search is going to radically transform the searching experience. The addition of Discover to Google.com for mobile devices itself is going to be a massive change for many.