The future of search: Google 20th Anniversary announcements

At the 20th anniversary and future of search event, Google announced a number of new search features. Ben Gomes, VP of search introduced concepts defining the next generation of search capabilities, three “search shifts”:

1. From answers to journeys.
2. From search queries to query-less discovery.
3. From text to visual content.

Personalizing the search journey. As per a Microsoft research, the search is not a one-off behavior. People conduct multiple queries over many sessions to accomplish tasks like finding jobs, planning weddings or holidays, etc. Today, Google restated that idea in two search-related announcements: Activity Cards and improved Collections. Activity Cards will surface where you left off in search showing you previous page visit and queries. They won’t show up every time or for all queries. Users can edit and remove results.

Google Feed becomes ‘Discover’. Google revealed that Google feeds has 800 million monthly active users. Feed is an increasing source of traffic for third-party publishers. The company announced the name change with some enhancements. So Google feeds is now Discover.

Visual search: The third major set of announcements was around visual search and discovery. These updates take some of their inspiration from some major social media sites. Also, Google is beginning to use AI to intelligently construct AMP stories and surface this content in Search. Starting today, stories about notable people like celebrities and athletes providing a glimpse into facts and important moments from their lives in a rich will start surfacing your feeds.

How this will affect social media marketing.

Google is bringing making search more structured with pre-empting or suggesting queries that will generate additional search sessions. Old blue links, especially on mobile devices, will further loss importance. Google is bringing more importance for AI in the search. AI is trying to make search more personal. Once a query is asked, AI will find more content related to the query and help in decision making. All these new features create more options for social media marketers.

AMP pages are going to be relevant in social media marketing. Google is promoting AMP with all their updates. Also, people love reading from pages that pop up so fast. Most of the news and media has already moved to AMP pages for their blogs.