Celebrating its 20th birthday, Google is the one giving the surprises.
Back when it was born, Google's mission was to organize the web's information, and make them accessible and useful. At that time, the project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was ambitious.
This is because, considering that in 1998, the web only had about 25 million pages.
Fast forward to 2018. the web has grown far larger, as explained by Ben Gomes, Google's VP for Search, News and Assistant:
"Through all of this, we’ve remained grounded in our mission. In fact, providing greater access to information is as core to our work today as it was when we first started. And while almost everything has changed about technology and the information available to us, the core principles of Search have stayed the same."
Here, Google want to stay focus on users by serving the most relevant and quality information they need, as quickly as possible.
With Google receiving billions of queries every single day, about 15 percent of them are never been seen. To anticipate this, Google's only way to effectively provide search results is through algorithmic approach. "This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow."
And with the everchanging trends the web is experiencing, Google wants to keep up. This is why it tests every change it makes, by evaluating them and experimenting them via raters.
In its 20th birthday, the next chapter of Search, is making information even more accessible and useful for users. Looking forward for the next 20 years, the next chapter is driven by three fundamental shifts in how Google thinks about Search:
- The shift from answers to journeys.
- The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information.
- The shift from text to a more visual way of finding information.
And underpinning each of these, are Google's approach and advancements in AI, in improving its ability to understand language in ways that weren’t possible when Google first started.
Here, the search giant has introduced tons of new features for a refreshed user experience across platforms. These range from organizing users' search results better, to introducing an Instagram-like Stories as presentations for selected contents.
They include, and not limited to:
- Activity cards: When visiting a search query from the past, Google can display all previous steps in the form of a card. Each activity card will display related search queries and all the pages that users previously visited that were related to the topic.
- Search collections: Google allows users to save their search results directly from the activity cards to collections, and recommend some related links they might want to add.
- AMP Stories: Google uses AI to create Instagram-like AMP Stories focusing on celebrities and athletes. Publishers who have adopted the AMP Stories standard will see their content appear in this new format in search results.
- Featured Videos: Google can show a number of selected videos related to the topic users have searched for, as well as related sub-topics.
- Google Lens integration in image search: Google brought its Google Lens into Google Images, allowing users to automatically identify objects within an image, by tapping on the Lens button. Users can then click on any of the results and see relevant images.
- Discover: Google introduces Discover in its search app where users can see Google's recommendations based on their interests. The company said that it aims to show more videos and evergreen content - articles which are not new to the internet, but might be new to the users.
