Google Search is the web's largest search engine, with almost nothing can come close.
It's the most popular search engine and the most widely-used because of many reasons: From the speed it's capable of fetching its search results, to the speed it indexes new content from the web, to how it is integrated to all of Google's other properties. The thing is, the search engine is far from perfect.
Although its algorithms are indeed capable of sorting and filtering things out, and are more than capable of personalizing the search results based on users' past, Google Search has weaknesses.
In this case, the search engine has historically been poor at answering questions whose answers tend to be diverse, like for example, open-ended questions, like "which laptop is the best on the market."
This kind of questions tend to have free-form answers. What this means, Google Search has to understand users' intention, and get to know information that is subjective.
To address this issue, Google introduces 'Discussions and forums.'
What it does, is allowing Google to incorporate results taken from discussion forums, including Reddit, Quora and more, in response to "searches that might benefit from … diverse personal experiences."
For all this time, Google Search has been giving a preferential treatment to its own properties.
The company uses its dominance in the search industry to squeeze out competitors of other services. Google does this intentionally, and has been found prioritizing its own products over organic results.
While this attracted criticisms, there is no stopping Google from 'monopolizing' and doing what it does.
This strategy certainly benefits Google, because Google is like funneling the money towards itself. However, this also makes Google Search less reliable.
And here, in order to make Google a much better search engine when dealing with open-ended questions, Google is "bringing more voices to Search."
According to Google News product manager Itamar Snir and Google Search product manager Lauren Clark in a blog post:
The Discussions and forums feature has been made available for English users on mobile devices, initially in the U.S..
It is meant to show content from forums and online discussions across the web, together with other Google Search result.
So for example, users using Google Search to query "the best laptop for gaming," Google can provide the usual links to numerous sources, as well as links to forum posts that include opinions from people.
"[Discussions and forums] will help bring you even more viewpoints, so you can have additional context and choices when you search," Snir and Clark continued. "These … new features will bring more perspectives to your search, helping you make informed choices and learn more about what’s going on around the world."
In addition to Discussions and forums, Google also announced that it's introducing ways to help users avoid language barriers when it comes to getting local perspectives on international news stories.
In this update, when users search, they will see results in their preferred language..