Google Is Getting A More Social Look

 

20 years ago, Google was born and it allowed the world to easily search for content on the web. And although the search giant has made some incredible enhancements in search over the past 20 years, the general appearance of Google’s search results really hasn’t changed a great deal – e.g. you type in some words and get back a list of links.

Of course, Google has added a few features over the years and given the pages a more modern style but the core concept and experience is virtually the same.

However, this is about to change…

Google revealed a number of major updates at the event that marked their 20^th anniversary of search, that will essentially change the way we search and in terms of look and feel Google is moving into social media territory.

We will still have links in the form of lists but we will begin to see more social aspects such as a newsfeed, videos, photo-focused content and stories.

Here are some of the features we can expect to see:

• Discover – this is Google’s answer to a news feed and will be rolled out to mobile and will be featured on its homepage for desktop users. The content within the news feed will be based on your interests and search history.

• Stories – this feature will begin to appear more frequently within the search results. It allows publishers to create web-based flipbooks. Effectively, they are visual stories and will surface more on Google Images and Discover.

• Google Images – will be getting a complete overhaul, which includes a new ranking algorithm that has a great emphasis on web page authority and freshness of content.

• Google Lens – the existing feature will be brought to Google Images, which will be able to analyse images and find things of interest within them. You will then be able to select the object of interest to see relevant images.

This means we are likely to begin to see the same sort of styled content we see on the major social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest.

This isn’t Google trying to reinvent social media. It’s just a more modern way of searching, enabling you to navigate the search results as easily as you would on social networking platforms.

This overhaul is mostly down to millennials and younger users who have different expectations of the web and expect to see more visual content than text.

The change will also help the search giant to keep up with the social media companies that have been edging into search over the last few years.

The rollout of these new features won’t happen overnight but are expected to be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks, so you can expect to see a more social approach to search very soon!