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.

Comments

idiocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The new design sounds like something straight from idiocracy.

Re:idiocracy

[GoTeam]

Who wouldn't want videos to autoplay. Netflix added it and everyone loves it. I don't see how this could be at all irritating. /s

Re:idiocracy

[Red_Forman]

The new design sounds like something a dumbass would do.

Re:idiocracy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

At least when I go to Netflix, I want to watch a video.

Anything else?

[DarkRookie]

So I deleted my Google account last week when I could no longer stop the new Gmail redesign.
Today I switch to Duckduckgo as a primary search engine. Just would really like a way to completely switch from infinite scroll to pagination.
Anything else? I never have used Chrome. My phone is just about as de-googled as you can get.

Re:Anything else?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Today I switch to Duckduckgo as a primary search engine. Just would really like a way to completely switch from infinite scroll to pagination.

If you use the JS free version, it uses pagination. Also, there are quite a few options. Have you examined them.

My phone is just about as de-googled as you can get.

This is a very long way of saying "I got an iPhone".

Anything else?

I assume you don't have files/documents in Google Drive/Google Docs. Any Calendar entries?

There's also telling people with Google phones not to tag you in photos/activities in whatever Google thing exists (including their calendar). And knowing if you're emailing their Gmail account.

There's also worries about blocking their ads/analytics/tracking through a plugin (uMatrix, NoScript, etc) as you surf the web.

Lastly, if you can look up the Google StreetCar schedule, don't forget to hide during it.

Re:Anything else?

[DarkRookie]

Thank for the the DuckDuckGo thing. Didn't see that. I chose this one cause it had the best results of the ones I tried.
No iPhone. Just have disabled almost all the Google apps (I have Maps, Clock, and Phone)
NoScript and uBlock are already running

Cool. I am good to go.

is the a late april fools?

[Idimmu Xul]

did google learn nothing from yahoo?

Re:is the a late april fools?

[nwf]

did google learn nothing from yahoo?

That no matter how much you screw up, someone idiot will still pay you?

Re:is the a late april fools?

[grep -v '.*' *]

did google learn nothing from yahoo?

John Hammond: Don't worry, I'm not making the same mistakes again.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, you're making all new ones

Re:hahaha

[sittingnut]

i get the feeling these changes, most of which depend on tracking users continuously, were designed to make google as different from duckduckgo as possible. duckduckgo cannot do any of this. only a massive privacy invader can do them.
but that also indicate google is feeling the competition from duckduckgo and others(even ones who track users, but don't have the resources to do all this) catching up.
hope google go down this path and lose all the users with any brains.

What's a "card"?

[marcle]

I don't use Google much (mostly Duck Duck Go), nor am I a subscriber, or use Chrome, or anything like that. So I'm a little confused about what a "card" is. Any explanations appreciated.

Re:What's a "card"?

[sexconker]

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.)

Re: What's a "card"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You. I like you.

Only 20 years old?

[Snotnose]

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.

Re:Only 20 years old?

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

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.

Chrome 69+ autologin mystery solved

[devslash0]

So this is why Chrome 69+ automatically logs people into Chrome as soon as it sniffs out a valid G* session. They simply need to link everything they know or may discover about the user in order to power the upcoming set of (bad) features.

Re:Alternative search engines without the stalking

[rogoshen1]

not to be confused with backpage.com, which gives you herpes.

This sounds like a special form of H377

[WillAffleckUW]

Sorry, but showing continuous snippets that are deemed "relevant" to your search sounds to me like a special version of Hades.

And not the funny cartoony kind.

remember?

[astrofurter]

Anyone else remember when Google used to have products that were better than the competition?

When Gmail was new it was massively superior to all contemporary webmail systems. Whereas the new "Fisher Price Gmail" is a design disaster. Gmail's spam filter absolutely refuses to filter certain major spammers - presumably because they paid Goog to be above the law. Quality of Google's search results has been declining for years. Android security has always been a bad joke, by design.

Maps is still awesome - so I'm waiting for Google to ruin that one next.

Seriously, Big Brother Google, what's up? Did you fire all your talented engineers & designers for being insufficiently authoritarian? Or did they just Walk Away once you publicly decided to be evil?

treating his own browser like an amusement park

[epine]

I really don't want my search results turned into an amusement park. Count me out, if there be any power left in User CSS.

Calendar spam

[Not-a-Neg]

Google was even so kind as to show an upcoming events list for the years 2019-2021, the list was filled with nothing but spam that Google had automatically put into my calendar without my consent and provided no clear way to remove. The worst part being that I never use Google Calendar, EVER!