Google to lose that blank look

After failing to successfully launch a social media service, the search giant will present its own news feed

The most uncluttered page on the Internet is about to lose its minimalist status. Google has announced that its home page, launched in 1996, is going to give up its white space. Instead, it will get a Facebook-like news feed, much like the mobile version which suggests stories based on your search history. This function has been available for a while and tends to be pretty good.

The key difference between Twitter or Facebook’s curated waterfall of news is that Google will use an algorithm, instead of following people.

It is surprisingly big news, perhaps because Google’s minimalist page is such a throwback to a simpler time. Initially, it had just a small search box and two buttons: “Google search” and “I’m feeling lucky”. It was a revelation.

Before that, the Internet was quaint enough — perhaps small enough — to have manually constructed lists of the coolest places. That’s what Yahoo did. Its alphabetical and thematical lists were a great example of the early, manual curation of the day.

Google’s home page set it apart.

The idea of search, the concept that the Internet was navigable enough to search, was in its infancy. Sites like Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista and other early search operations would ultimately fade against the might of Google’s superior technology.

Google was different because it didn’t just scan the Internet for results for keywords. It calculated how popular those results were — by checking how many other sites linked to that specific page. If it was good, the logic went, many other people would also think so — and have a link to it. It was democracy in action.

Google has evolved into the behemoth it is today, but it all began with that white page. Adwords, its next great offering after search, and Gmail, would respectively become its financial growth engine and the defining example of the next generation of e-mail: cloud-based webmail.

Google has had numerous industry-leading successes, from Google Maps and Earth to Google Docs, the best way to work collaboratively on the Internet.

Of course, arguably its two best acquisitions were Youtube (at the time for an eye-watering Us$1.5bn) and a little smartphone operating system called Android, now the biggest in the world. A lesser-known purchase was a photo-organising software called Picasa, that has evolved into the now indispensable Google Photos, by far the best photo-management app there is. And now with Drive, it’s a big player in cloud-based computing.

But Google has never mastered social media. It’s never had an answer to Facebook, or Twitter — despite numerous abortive attempts including Google Plus and Buzz. Even the breakthrough Wave never took off.

A newsfeed based on search interests does seem like a smart adaptation of Google’s existing strengths and current social media habits. Time will tell if it will add another feather to

Google’s cap.

Among its best acquisitions was a little smartphone operating system called Android