Several times during a day we find ourselves looking at our phones, after having checked all the social media apps, wondering which app to refresh and check again (Yes, I’m assuming we’re all velas). Now, Google Search can also be added to that list of apps whose feeds we refresh when bored out of our minds.
On Wednesday, Google announced that they are bringing an update to their search app centered on bringing a new personalized feed feature to the app. This feed would include links about hobbies, travel, sports, and several other topics. This new update would put Google into direct competition with social media sites, like Facebook.
Google also unveiled that this new update would be coming to users in the U.S. on Wednesday, and other countries in a few weeks. This new update is named “Google Feed”, which closely resembles Facebook”s “News Feed”.
Even with the striking similarity between the names, Google claims that it is not trying to duplicate Facebook Inc. but is instead trying to create another platform where people can use a stream of relevant search results, in a more personalized way. The company stated that a typical example of the new updates can be a link to a website with information about a vacation spot, or a link to a page about a hobby like hiking.
“This feed is really about your interests … It’s not really about what your friends are interested in,” Ben Gomes, a Google vice president for engineering, said in a briefing with reporters.
Both Facebook and Google are competing over the advertising revenue opportunities online. According to research firm eMarketer, the two Silicon Valley companies are expected to have around 50 percent of all the online ad spending in 2018. However, Gomes said that there were no immediate plans to have advertisements on Google Feed.
The links that are suggested in the Google Feed would be based on the user’s Google search history, as well as data from other services provided by Google, like YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. Besides having the Google Feed feature on phone apps, Google is also trying to accommodate it into the web browsers in some way. In addition to this, Google also released guidelines so that the developers would be able to format their entries in a way that users can look for them more easily while searching for activities.
Feel free to tell us what you think about this new feature Google is offering.