Google didn’t invent search, but the company has made it our prism for the internet. We don’t go to specific pages because instead we look for information. That means that any tweaking with the magic Google formula is always going to be significant, and the company has now begun the roll-out of some of the most significant changes in several years.
There is, however, nothing much to frighten the horses: the company has tidied up its logo slightly, but the homepage that will confront millions of users will barely look any different. When it comes to results pages, however, there will be real changes. Rather than a crisp list of pages related to a user’s query ranged against the left-hand side of the screen, now a new bar has appeared. At first glance it appears to simply offer some simple options to limit which search results are visible – so if you search for “string theory”, it will offer “images”, “news”, “video” and more. But search, say, for shoes, and you’ll find that “shopping” appears as an option, as does the opportunity to limit results by colour.
The important thing about this new development is that Google now reckons it knows what sort of thing you’re looking for – so the options change according to the particular search. It is worth pointing out that Google is now doing what Microsoft’s search engine Bing has been doing for a while, and that the two products now look remarkably similar. That’s a good thing for users, since it means that the world’s most popular search engine now has all the features that previously made Bing a genuine challenger to Google’s claims to also be the best.
Indeed, this also highlights the obvious problems of Google’s market dominance - it is now so large that it can theoretically crush its rivals simply by (legitimately) adopting their best features. Other new tools that Google is offering include suggestions for similar but different search terms – so “string theory” results will also include the suggestion that you might want to search for “quantum mechanics”. This is the first step to the company’s previously stated aim of telling users what they want to know before they’ve even realised that they want to find it out.
With that in mind, it’s worth also looking back at how the company has been integrating real time results, from social networks such as Twitter, and news results from sites such as the BBC and the Telegraph. The effect is to differentiate between what people want to know now about current topics and what is more historic. The effect, perhaps, will be to create two tiers of knowledge – a reference library, and a glorified chat room. Perhaps that development might, even, make aspects of the web more obviously authoritative. So Google could claim that it’s not only ranking information, but also helping to organise it accurately.
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