Google Makes New “Smart Feed” in its Search Engine

Google, the world’s largest search engine and a unit of Alphabet Inc.,  is making search results in its mobile app to include a personalized feed of links about hobbies, travel, sports and other topics, as it battles Facebook and Amazon for the attention of and information about online consumers.

The new offering is called “Google Feed,” a name that may conjure comparison’s to Facebook’s “News Feed,” a feature on Facebook used to browse updates from friends, family and other sources. This innovative move would start rolling out in the United States on Wednesday and other countries in the coming weeks.

However, Google said that it was not trying to duplicate Facebook Inc, the world’s largest social network. Instead, the company said it wanted to create another place to see a stream of relevant search results.

Facebook and Google are competing for attraction online, and by extension, for advertising revenue based on those eyeballs. The two Silicon Valley companies are expected to take in some 50% of overall online ad spending in 2018, according to a research firm.

The feed appears directly below the search bar in the Google app, where users will see a stream of personally relevant articles and media content powered by Google’s machine learning algorithms. The feed itself can be customized by tapping the three dots on top of a card, from which content can be shared, followed, or dismissed to avoid seeing the subject again. It sits in place of Google Now, the company’s predictive search feature that displays traffic updates, weather and other information, all of which has been moved to a new tab called Updates.

Users will also be able “follow” an area of interest with one touch of a button. Having users input this information could help Google further tailor search results and provide better information to advertisers. This could help Google compete in mobile advertising against Facebook, which collects detailed information about users based on their likes and preferences, then uses this information to target ads.

Google Feed will suggest links based on a user’s Google search history as well as data from other Google services, such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Calendar, the company said.

“This feed is really about your interests… It’s not really about what your friends are interested in,” Ben Gomes, a Google Vice President of engineering, said in a statement.

While Google now sells everything from videos to smartphones, it still got 87% of its first quarter revenue from selling ads.

The changes will come first to the English version of the Google app for Android and iOS. International versions and one for browsers will be added eventually, the company executives said.

Meanwhile, other tech companies have come to similar conclusions. LinkedIn upgraded its home page and app with more scrolling feed-like features, and this week Amazon Inc. launched Spark, a feed of shoppable product stories, pictures and ideas.

The idea is to make the feed “an extension of Google search,” said Shashidhar Thakur, Vice President of Search, in presentation to reporters earlier this week. The goal is “to keep you in the know even when you’re not searching,” Thakur said.

The feed is the company’s latest effort to motivate users to browse with their Google app instead of thinking of it as a simple search portal. Its introduction in the app is also seen as a prelude to bringing similar personalized elements to the Google homepage proper.

Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) traded 1.13%, or 10.99, to $986.95, by 5:09 AM GMT-4. It opened in $973.36, with a session high of $990.85 and a session low of $972.04. Its market capitalization was 674.16 billion, and its P/E ratio was 33.33.

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