20 years of Google: what innovations the most popular search engine in the world is preparing

At a special press conference timed to coincide with the company's 20th anniversary, Google spoke about the upcoming changes to the search engine. Some of them touched upon existing functions, while others were demonstrated for the first time. One way or another, all of them are designed to simplify the receipt of information, making the presentation of content more convenient.

Restarting Google Feed

The Google Feed, available on Android smartphones on the far left desktop, will now be called Discover. The rebranding will be followed by redesign and empowerment. More interactive content will appear, including videos.

Each recommended article will be supplemented with the name of the topic to which it relates. The user will be able to go to it after seeing other similar materials, as well as subscribe to keep abreast of new publications. It will also be possible to mark which ones should be offered more often and which ones - less often.

Discover will be available not only as a separate feed, but also on the Google homepage in all mobile browsers. Regardless of the location, the service will be able to display content in several languages at once. First, support for English and Spanish will appear in the United States, and later in other countries.

Links to past requests

Google search will now be able to recognize when you return to a topic that you have previously searched for. A special card (Activity Cards) with a list of visited pages will notify about previous requests.

This history will be displayed only for certain requests. In this case, the list of pages that you have already viewed before can be edited manually. This will remove unwanted results, leaving only what is really useful to return to. If necessary, these cards can be turned off altogether.

Own "Stories"

Also Google search will have "Stories". They will be generated by artificial intelligence and include text, images and videos related to the user's search query. At first, the function will only work when searching for celebrities.

Thematic cards

The constant analysis of trillions of different queries allows Google to predict in advance the information that the user may look for in the next step of the search.

For example, if you typed the word "pug", then further you will probably search for characteristics of the breed or photos of famous pugs. And those who are interested in long-haired breeds of dogs may well look for information about the features of caring for them.

Based on these links, Google will now automatically detect topics and create cards for them at the top of the SERPs. They will contain all possible subtopics and results of similar queries from other users.

Smart image search

There will be more useful information about images in Google Images. In addition, there will be integration with the Google Lens service, which will allow you to search by a fragment or an object in the photo. The definition function will work both in automatic and manual mode, when the user himself can specify the desired object.

As an example, a photo was given with a baby cot in the room. Google Lens integration made it possible to find the same crib in a separate photo. Similarly, Google Lens computer vision can be used to search for products in online stores.

Smart search by video fragments

The new feature, called Featured Videos, will make it faster to find videos that match a user's query. It will also work on the basis of computer vision technology, which will be able to recognize video fragments suitable for the user's request and display them as previews.

For example, when you search for a certain city in the search results, videos dedicated to its sights may appear. These and other innovations are intended to make Google searches more accurate and smarter.