How do you improve what is already the dominant search engine in the online world? With small changes that can make a big difference in user experience. News comes to the search engine and Google Maps.
To understand the new features that will reach the Google First, we need to take a little trip back in time. In 2017, Google announced the Lens application, a visual search engine that allows you to search for various information by capturing a photograph. Despite the application's various features and advanced visual recognition system, usage only skyrocketed when Google integrated a small Lens icon directly into the main search engine box. Currently, Lens is used eight billion times a month.
Now Google wants to bring more advanced search functionality to the search engine. In the version for mobile devices (first for iOS, later for Android), below the search box, Google will start to show other interactive ways of searching that users already have, at this moment, at their disposal, but that neither are always easy to find and will become more prominent – for example, humming to find a song, using Lens to solve a calculation or immediately entering translation mode.
“It's about making [Google] more intuitive so people don't waste time figuring out how to search.”, said Rajan Patel, vice president of engineering for the North American technology company's search engine, in an early presentation to journalists.
BUT: Africa winners of Google's program that funds journalistic projects revealed
Another novelty that reinforces this trend are the suggestions that Google will show when users ask a question in the search engine. Underneath the search box, the technology will start showing keywords related to that search. If the user selects one of the keywords, it will make the search more specific, more in-depth on that topic. In practice, the more keywords you select, the more refined (and effective, in theory) your search will be.
"The way people search and ask for information was never meant to be constrained by a search box. We want them to be able to search in the way that is most natural for them.”, further commented the company executive.
Google will also begin to explore new formats for displaying search results. For example, in research related to tourism and travel, technology will focus more on multimedia content, with greater prominence and better positioning for images, relegating text (which until now typically dominates search results) to the background.
But the fusion of different search typologies – that is, using text, image or sound in a single search –, something that technology calls multimodal search (multi search in the original in English), is a trend that is here to stay. By the end of the year, Google will launch the 'multi search' functionality in Portuguese, which allows you to search for correspondence through an image, after which the user can refine that search by adding text.
