Google Updates: How Google Lens and Discover Reinforce Mobile Trends – Edgy Labs

Google is once again tweaking its image features and also introducing the new Google Discover. | Image By Evan Lorne | Shutterstock
You may have had the “new look” for Gmail forced on you already. But the full roll-out won’t complete until late October. It complements the new look for Google Drive, as well (unfortunately).
But those new UI updates aren’t the only changes Google has in the works.
Google just celebrated their search engine’s twentieth birthday — hard to believe. As such, Google plans to launch new features for various aspects of their services.
Most notably, Google’s image results will now sport a “Featured Videos” section. This serves to put the focus on existing AMP Stories already in the search. This also means that the results will be even more visual.
That’s where Google Lens comes in, as well, to further boost the visual aspects.
For those unfamiliar with Google Lens, it’s an app that enables more interconnectedness to your life based on images. Say, for example, that you want to identify a plant on a hike. You can use Google Lens to help you do that with images.
Unfortunately, it isn’t compatible with all Android devices such as my Samsung Galaxy S6. Despite that, the integration into image results will add a Lens button at the bottom of each picture.
Tapping it reveals things Google thinks you will find interesting. It might also recommend similar or related products. For those familiar with the Lens app, you may already recognize these features as they are present in the app itself.
For now, these features will be limited to mobile devices. But the algorithm by which Google indexes photos and their websites will be changing, too. You can read more about that here on Engadget.
Google’s various projects go by many names and they seem to change fairly often.
Last year, Google Feed delivered more personalized news to your news feeds. If you’re unfamiliar with Google Feed, just do a quick search on your mobile device and scroll a bit. You will probably see related articles and news stories to your search.
This will now become Google Discover and should provide more “tailored” results based on the data they have on your interests. However, more than just the name and results will become augmented.
The update adds topic headers to encourage topic exploration. But your interests will be more readily viewable which will change over time based on your habits. However, this means that Google may provide years old results due to relevancy to your “interests”.
Discover also adds a control icon to allow users to better curate which topics they see more and less of. It will support English and Spanish content with more languages on the way.
Check out more information about the new change on Google’s blog.
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Content Specialist and EDGY OG with a (mostly) healthy obsession with video games. She covers Industry buzz including VR/AR, content marketing, cybersecurity, AI, and many more.
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