Google wants to answer the questions you haven’t even asked
NEWYORK/SANFRANCISCO: For two decades, typing a line of text into a blank search bar was the way almost everyone interacted with Google. Now the company is taking an even more active role in leading users around the internet.
The search giant announced a raft of new features at an event on Monday to celebrate its 20th anniversary. A Facebook-like newsfeed populated with videos and articles the company thinks an individual user would find interesting will now show up on the Google home page just below the search bar on all mobile web browsers.
“It helps you come across the things you haven’t even started looking for,” Karen Corby, a product manager on Google’s search team, said in a blog post. The company also unveiled a feature to let people save searches in a collection and pick them up again later, and said it would present more information directly in search results, ostensibly helping people find what they’re looking for without having to click through to a different website.
The Alphabet Inc. unit wants to expand its presence on the web and get people to spend more time directly on Google rather than on independent websites. In its drive to help people find information they’re looking for, the firm is taking on tasks that were previously left to others. At the same time, politicians, activists and competitors are calling for greater scrutiny of its ever-growing power over data.
On Friday, Bloomberg News reported that US President Donald Trump was considering signing an executive order that would instruct federal antitrust agencies to look into Google and other internet giants like Facebook Inc.
Expanding beyond a simple search bar isn’t a new development. Google has already pushed deep into some industries like travel, building its own flight and hotel search tools that have elbowed their way into a market traditionally dominated by Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group Inc.
One of the features, collections, works similarly to online scrapbook Pinterest. The expanded feed, called Discover, increases Google’s role in suggesting content and information to people, rather than just being the portal they use to find things on their own.