Thanks as always for reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can peruse previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. If you have any feedback or ideas for future newsletters, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
A little introductory self-promotion: It’s Next Big Things in Tech week here at Fast Company. On Tuesday, we published our annual list of innovative tech projects from big companies, intrepid startups, nonprofits, and beyond—the kind of breakthroughs that might just be emerging from the lab but have a shot at shaping the next five years of business and life in general. You can check out the complete roster of 119 honorees as well as individual lists in categories such as Apps, Robotics and Automation, and Workplace and Productivity. Our goal was to put bold new ideas in the spotlight, not just to honor proven winners, and the results are full of gems you haven’t read about elsewhere.
Over the past few years, a dismaying trend has overwhelmed the results for many of my Google queries. Fewer of the links I get lead to high-quality content relating to my search requests. And more of them direct me to material that ranges from mediocre to awful. In some cases, it’s advertising masquerading as objective advice. Other times, it’s SEO-optimized junk that isn’t worth anybody’s time. And sometimes, I’m not entirely sure what it is.
Has Google lost some of its mojo when figuring out which pages deserve to rise to the top of its results? Or is it just reflecting an internet that’s increasingly overwhelmed with dreck? I suspect the answer, ultimately, is “a little bit of both!”
But there’s an antidote at hand: a search engine that zeroes in on material created by actual people and shared at places like Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and various online forums. Using it, as I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks, is a reminder of how helpful our fellow human beings can be. And here’s the kicker: This search engine is part of Google, and has been around since last May. I just didn’t know it existed.
In part, that’s because it’s really a filter for search results, not a separate search tool unto itself. Then there’s its name, “Perspectives,” which makes it sound like some newspaper’s snooze-inducing opinion section. But mostly I overlooked Perspectives because it’s only been available in Google’s mobile apps (which I didn’t even have installed) and mobile web version (where I didn’t notice it tucked among numerous other filters, such as ones for news and images).
Soon enough, Perspectives may feel more like a foundational element of the Google search experience than a well-hidden Easter egg. On November 15, Google announced that it will be bringing the feature to desktop search “in the coming weeks.” It’s also retooling it to emphasize the people behind the content, playing up their social identities, follower counts, and the like.
I’m looking forward to Perspectives showing up in this more prominent form. By focusing on results from venues dominated by authentic advice from individuals, it instantly sweeps away a vast amount of cruft that weighs down search results in their default form. I’ve found it especially refreshing for the kind of queries where I want to start with intelligent do-it-myself troubleshooting strategies, whether they involve plumbing mishaps or clogged inkjet printers.
With a little effort—such as appending “reddit” to the end of queries—it’s always been possible to steer results in this general direction. Search VP Cathy Edwards says that Perspectives acknowledges the critical importance of raising the profile of user-generated information. “We’ve heard from users over and over that what they really want to see is insights from other people like them,” she says. “They’re looking for that social signaling. They’re looking for that peer-validated input.”
In the same spirit, Google is introducing another feature that puts people and their insights at the heart of search. Called Notes, it lets anyone post a brief comment about a web page. The basic idea dates all the way back to the previous century when a startup called ThirdVoice did something in the same conceptual ZIP code. Other variations have come and gone ever since.
Rather than just rehashing something that failed in the past, Google’s take has a distinctly modern feel. You can customize fonts, add stickers, and upload images, making each Note a dead ringer for a bite-size piece of content you might see in a story on Snapchat or Instagram. Just as important, the company is in a better position than anyone else to put a feature like this in front of a huge audience: You can add and view Notes right within search results, where the feature is hard to miss. (At the moment, however, they’re visible only in Google’s mobile incarnations, and only if you’ve turned them on via the Search Labs option.)
Google doesn’t envision Notes as a platform for weighty debate: When you start to type one in, you get a reminder to keep it “friendly and helpful.” All the Notes I’ve stumbled across so far meet that bar of basic pleasantness. Only a smaller percentage add meaningfully to the discussion (“I also added a touch of flaky salt after the cookies were out of the oven for a sweet/salty twist”) rather than simply radiating feel-good vibes (“My family loves this cookie recipe!”). Whether they end up as a meaty addition to search rather than a glorified Like button remains to be seen. But I’m glad Google is giving them a try.
It’s also too early to know if my current frustrations with Google search will fade as features such as Perspectives and Notes ramp up. The new features aren’t one-offs, though: The company has also been working on other approaches to highlighting great information from individuals, as well as helping forums raise their own profiles in results. Edwards acknowledges concerns about the current state of search in its more conventional form. “A bunch of the things that we announced . . . are actually going to contribute to improving that experience for you,” she told me. “And that’s definitely something that we’ve heard from users, that they want this to be improved.”
If nothing else, I find all of these human-centric initiatives way more spiritually fulfilling than Google’s concurrent, error-prone forays into features powered by generative AI. It would be pretty entertaining if the secret of improving search lay not in turning it over to artificial intelligence—but in bringing back the humanity that’s been slipping away.
These hidden Google search features are full of promise
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29.11.2023
Thanks as always for reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can peruse previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. If you have any feedback or ideas for future newsletters, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
A little introductory self-promotion: It’s Next Big Things in Tech week here at Fast Company. On Tuesday, we published our annual list of innovative tech projects from big companies, intrepid startups, nonprofits, and beyond—the kind of breakthroughs that might just be emerging from the lab but have a shot at shaping the next five years of business and life in general. You can check out the complete roster of 119 honorees as well as individual lists in categories such as Apps, Robotics and Automation, and Workplace and Productivity. Our goal was to put bold new ideas in the spotlight, not just to honor proven winners, and the results are full of gems you haven’t read about elsewhere.
Over the past few years, a dismaying trend has overwhelmed the results for many of my Google queries. Fewer of the links I get lead to high-quality content relating to my search requests. And more of them direct me to material that ranges from mediocre to awful. In some cases, it’s advertising masquerading as objective advice. Other times, it’s SEO-optimized junk that isn’t worth anybody’s time. And sometimes, I’m not entirely sure what it is.
Has Google lost some of its mojo when figuring out which pages deserve to rise to the top........
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