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Google Revamps Search Engine To Include New Cards and Tags As It Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary (cnbc.com)
As Google celebrates its 20th anniversary, it announced a range of new updates to its namesake search engine. The Mountain View company announced it was drawing on its artificial intelligence capabilities to provide smart videos in Google search with a new "Featured Videos" card. It will start to play videos in results, one after another -- but only show the short parts of videos that are relevant to your search. Google, the parent company of which is Alphabet, also introduced an activity card which would show pages a user has visited, at the top of search results. Users will have the ability to delete items from this activity card. The company also introduced "Collections," through which it will let users save content from the activity card to their collections. Google will then use things you've saved, and your history, in order to recommend new content for your collections. CNBC adds: Additionally Google is enhancing topics for certain things you search for. If you search for "pug," for example, you'll see a card where you can find little things to tap, like names, training details and how to buy or adopt a pug. Google will make sure that these cards at the top of search results will stay fresh based on what people publish online, Google vice president of product management Nick Fox said.
Google is also redesigning its feed for recommended content, which appears in places like the Google app or the homescreen of Google's Pixel devices. It will now be called "Discover," and it will show videos, among other things, for the first time. [...] Google is bringing the Discover feed to the Google homepage on all mobile browsers in the next few weeks Moxley said. The Discover feed will remember preferences for the language you like different types of content to be in. For example, if you like recipes in Spanish, it will only show pages with Spanish-language recipes, but if you like your news in English, news articles will be in English.
Google's image search is getting enhancements. There will be tags that show products, and other kinds of images, like stock images and do-it-yourself tutorials, so you'll be able find the sort of thing you're looking for faster. Google Images will get its new look on desktop computers starting this Thursday.
Google is also redesigning its feed for recommended content, which appears in places like the Google app or the homescreen of Google's Pixel devices. It will now be called "Discover," and it will show videos, among other things, for the first time. [...] Google is bringing the Discover feed to the Google homepage on all mobile browsers in the next few weeks Moxley said. The Discover feed will remember preferences for the language you like different types of content to be in. For example, if you like recipes in Spanish, it will only show pages with Spanish-language recipes, but if you like your news in English, news articles will be in English.
Google's image search is getting enhancements. There will be tags that show products, and other kinds of images, like stock images and do-it-yourself tutorials, so you'll be able find the sort of thing you're looking for faster. Google Images will get its new look on desktop computers starting this Thursday.
The "cards" were introduced back when Google Now was its own separate thing.
The idea was you'd get cards relevant to you, such as weather, stock prices, sports scores, news, etc.
The reality was you'd get weather and a bunch of shit you didn't want. Sure, you could tell it you weren't interested in sports, politics, celebrity news, etc. but you may as well tell your mother in law you and your wife aren't ready to have kids yet. Even the shit it was supposed to do well got drowned out by the nonsense. Oh, you wanted your parking location? Sorry, the latest news from TMZ bumped that off the list. Your morning commute notification didn't happen because we thought you'd be more interested in local theater listings at 8 AM on a Wednesday. Sure, we can tell you that your flight was delayed after snooping through your email to know all your travel info, but it won't do you any good because you'll already be in the TSA grope line by the time the airline even admits the possibility of the flight being delayed.
Then Google Now got killed off in favor of just being part of the Google "app". In the latest Android versions I believe you swipe to one screen left of the leftmost homescreen to get to it. I don't know because I don't use that shit. I do know you have even less effective control over it than you had over Google Now, and it's more of a pain in the ass to disable because it's more deeply integrated into the Google "app", which is basically a search bar slapped onto Chrome plus the always listening agent that feeds all of your audio to HQ. (And Google's voice assistant is a joke. Bitch will ask you "Which application?" but will NEVER actually react to your response despite showing that it recognized it, as evidenced by the text at the top appearing correctly.)
Must be when they did the IPO. It was what, 92-93 when Alta Vista, then the search king, decided to take money to push your company to the top of the results. That ended up with nearly everyone, myself included, scrambling for a new search engine. Google won out, as history shows.
AltaVista launched in December -95 google in September -97, as another datapoint Mosaic was launched in January -93.