Search giant Google has announced changes to its iconic search engine, which will be made as part of the 20th anniversary of the company.
At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, Google revealed that it will be rebranding its news feed, which currently works as a list of items appearing underneath the search bar on the company’s mobile app, or on Android devices, when a user swipes left when on the home page. It will be rebranding this feed as ‘Discover’ and it will be located on the home page of all mobile browsers.
This is a massive shift for Google as it continues to work on better ways to organise data and help its users to understand context whilst using its mobile app.
Google has stated that Discover will be doing more to show users relevant content, which may not just contain recent news and content in the way it has done prior to this redevelopment. It will present users with topic links to delve deeper into the content shown on the news feed. There will also be a slider located on the bottom left corner of each topic/story that would allow users to increase or decrease the amount of content seen in the feed.
Currently, this news feed is personalised and prioritises topics and news stories with which the users has interacted. Discover will also feature multilingual content, so for example would provide users with English and Spanish content. These are the first two languages being implemented and the company has said that more will be coming to this section in the near future.
The Google Feed has more than 800 million users and it has sent more than 2.5 times more traffic to publishers and their content in the last 12 months.
A lot of these changes have been inspired by the Google News app, which was also redesigned earlier this year and introduced during the I/O developer conference.
Google has also announced that it will be making a change to the Images section of the site. There will be a new ranking algorithm for searches in this section. It will begin to show more ‘web content’ within the searches, including specific page information from the search page.
Google is planning on making a number of changes to mark the 20th anniversary of the company, many of which have been summed up by the Verge.
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