GOOGLE’S NEW FEEDS SHOW YOU THE INTERNET YOU WANT TO SEE

DAVID PIERCE

GOOGLE'S SEARCH BOX may be the internet's most powerful tool. Type a few words and you can find information on any topic ever considered. The box also takes requests: Set a timer. Flip a coin. Convert cups to tablespoons. Do a barrel roll.

But what if you don't know what to type? Google has no place for you when you have nothing on your mind, but you're third in line and don't feel like reading the covers of trashy checkout-counter magazines. That's part of why Google's taking everything it's learned about you and the world from all that searching, and using that data to create a feed of stuff you might be interested in. Starting today, Google's app will offer more than just a search box: It'll guess what you want to see, and display it without you having to lift a finger.

If you use Google's app, or have experimented with Google Now in the past, the new "feeds" will look familiar. When you open the app you'll be presented with an infinitely scrolling list of stuff Google thinks you might be interested in based on your browsing and searching history: news headlines, blog posts, 12 Foods You Can Feed Your Dog listicles, and more, along with sports scores, movie trailers, and the like. It's like what Google Reader might have evolved to become in 2017, if Google hadn't murdered Google Reader in 2013.

Now, though, you can control and customize what shows up in your feed. If you search for something like "health care bill," you can tap the new Follow button at the top of the results to get more health care-related news in your feed. You'll probably get more anyway, since Google assumes you're interested in the things you search for, but actively following sends a much stronger signal. You can tell Google when you're done reading about Drake because really you just wanted to know what that one lyric was, or that you never want to see stories from the Daily Mail ever again. Think of the new feeds as your personal recommendations list for the entire internet.

On Tuesday, at a presentation for a room full of reporters, a trio of Google employees were careful to frame the feeds as another way to display search results, rather than a new product. The company uses the same data it parses in the search engine, and using many of the same features—like its new fact-check markup for news stories—that inform the way you see search results now. They were also adamant that this news feed is nothing like Facebook's News Feed. "If you have any questions, Google should have answers," said Ben Gomes, Google's vice president of engineering for search. "We also want to provide you with the ability to explore, to satisfy and pique your curiosity."

More than anything, the new feature sound like a competitor to apps like Flipboard and Nuzzel. No service knows you or sees the internet as well as Google, so it seems plausible Google could build the best, most updated, most personalized news-reading app ever. Part of the company's plan involves surfacing older things you've never seen before, things that might otherwise get buried in recency-biased search results. And if you tap on any person, place, or topic, you'll drop right into search results, where you can learn even more.

This is the beginning of what appears to be an important new feature for Google—anything that appears on google.com matters. And it's clear that Google sees this as a way to get more people into the Google app more often. But the company is still working out some details. Gomes deflected questions about ads or sponsored posts in feeds, though that seems virtually guaranteed. And to questions about whether Google's creating yet another echo chamber on the internet, a place for people to find what they want to hear and nothing more, Google's execs effectively said that's an algorithm issue. They hope that the trending topics modules, along with the new fact-check and varying-viewpoint tools, can show people more than what they explicitly ask for.

For nearly two decades, Google's been the place you go when you need something. Every time you turned around, there were new somethings. But you always had to go looking. Now, with products like Google Assistant and features like the new feeds, the search engine hopes to flip the script a little. Now, Google comes to you.

https://www.wired.com/story/googles-new-feeds-show-you-the-internet-you-want-to-see/