Why Google wants search results to look like social media

For all its behind-the-scenes innovations, Google Search has been more or less the same over the last 20 years: you type words into a search box and you get a list of links.

Over the years, the company has added a lot of whistles and whistles, but the basic concept has remained the same and the experience is pretty much the same.

But that will change soon.

At an event marking the 20th anniversary of the research, Google unveiled a suite of updates designed to fundamentally alter the way we conduct our research and presentation of research results. You will still see links lists but, increasingly, you will also see features generally considered to be directly on the territory of social media companies: news feed, vertical video, photo-centric content and, yes, Stories .

Quick summary of some specific updates:

• Google's custom feed feature, now known as "Discover," will be deployed to all mobile users and its home page on the desktop. The feed feeds content based on your interests and search history. You can also save items from your feed into thematic "collections".

• The society "double", on Stories, which will appear more frequently in the search results. In addition to the AMP Stories created by the publisher (Mashable is an initiative partner), Google will now use AI to automatically create stories that can be touched on specific topics, such as celebrities.

• Google Images is undergoing a complete overhaul, including a new ranking algorithm that will focus on "evergreen content," such as recipes and DIY content. .

• Google Lens will be directly integrated with Google Images so you can search for specific items in photos.

Launch the Google app or google.com and the first thing you will see is a custom feed based on your interests. Start the search and you could be taken directly to the vertical video via AMP Stories or get Pinterest style recommendations in the search for images.

In other words: you'll start seeing the same style of content as the one posted on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Instead of scrolling through a static list of links or images, you'll be able to browse photos, video clips, and possibly scroll through text.

This is a big change for Google, which has a messy history with social networks. To be clear, Google is not trying to reinvent the social network here. But it's a question of revising the search so that you can navigate the search results as easily as you would with a social network.

Cathy Edwards, who heads Google Images, believes that this change is largely due to the millennial generation and younger users who have fundamentally different expectations of how to interact with the Web.

"They are just waiting to see more visual [content]. For them, the 10 blue links are weird, "says Edwards, referring to traditional search results.

Edwards recognizes that not all content is suitable for this format, but she says that we are changing paradigms and that, more and more, the best answer to a question is a photo or a video, not a lot of words.

"There will be topics on which you will have to dive deeper, but all you need from this visual response [this] will be really powerful. "

In some ways, that makes a lot of sense. To younger generations, who have never experienced life without social media, why should the research results look like they were 20 years ago?

It also helps Google stay abreast of social media companies, which are slowly encroaching on Google's ground when it comes to doing research. Snapchat, which has gradually added camera-compatible search features to its application, has announced a new partnership with Amazon to make product search available in its app. And Pinterest, perhaps the most dominant platform for photo-centric DIY content, has been investing in AI-based visual search for more than a year.

Google may not need to compete with these companies as a social network, but it competes with them for advertising dollars, which are largely driven by research. And as these companies invest more and more in research, Google is unlikely to imagine that a competing company is better able to create mobile search features first.

Enhancing photos and videos is also more feasible than ever before at a purely practical level, notes Edwards. As mobile devices have become more powerful and connections faster and more reliable, the presentation of search results is no longer the frustrating experience that a few years ago.

This is not a change that will happen overnight. Some of the new features, such as the Discover feed, are being implemented in the coming weeks, while others, like the new AMP Stories, will come later.

But the message is clear: the future of research is here and it looks like a social media app.