How fast have we forgotten what it was like to not have endless information at our fingertips with one click of a “search” button? How did we manage the navigation of “life” without search engines at our beckon call 24/7? We easily take this convenience for granted and are quick to judge if we don’t get the results expected, not appreciating the effort that is put into this technology for it to come to life. Google, the top search engine, is celebrating its 20th Anniversary and that’s something to be celebrated. Take a moment to distinguish the innovative advancements given to us in the last 20 years and get excited for what the next 20 will bring.
Something Fun
Google is sharing 20 years worth of our popular search history. Check it out!
Elaborating on what we can expect next of Google, Ben Gome shared:
As Google marks our 20th anniversary, I wanted to share a first look at the next chapter of Search, and how we’re working to make information more accessible and useful for people everywhere. This next chapter is driven by three fundamental shifts in how we think about Search:
- The shift from answers to journeys: To help you resume tasks where you left off and learn new interests and hobbies, we’re bringing new features to Search that help you with ongoing information needs.
- The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information: We can surface relevant information related to your interests, even when you don’t have a specific query in mind.
- And the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information: We’re bringing more visual content to Search and completely redesigning Google Images to help you find information more easily.
What Google shared that we’re excited about:
Activity Cards
“A new activity card will help you pick up from where you left off in Search. When you revisit a query related to a task you’ve started in the past, we’ll show you a card with relevant pages you’ve already visited and previous queries you’ve done on this topic. This helps you retrace your steps when you might not remember which sites had that useful information you’d found earlier.
We’re intelligently showing this card only when it’s useful; it won’t appear for every search. And you’ll have full control over it—you can easily remove results from your history, pause seeing this card, or choose not to see it all together. This new activity card will be available in Search later this year.”
Collections
“Another way to more easily navigate long search journeys is by adding useful content to Collections. Collections in Search help you keep track of content you’ve visited, such as a website or article or image, and quickly get back to it later.
Now, with an improved Collections experience, you can add your content from an activity card directly to Collections. This makes it even easier to keep track of and organize the content you want to revisit.”
