Google’s homepage has largely remained the same since 1996. It has been a pretty minimal webpage, with a big search bar in the center of the page. But now, it looks like Google is going to be making some radical changes to this homepage for the first time in over 20 years. The change includes adding Google’s interest and news-based feed to the home page. This has been a feature in the Google app since around 2012 when Google Now was announced and released. And now that is finally coming over to the desktop version.
Earlier this week, Google did announce that it was adding more customization to the feed, using its “advanced machine learning algorithms”. In fact, Google’s vice president of engineering, Shashi Thakur stated that “you’ll see cards with things like sports highlights, top news, engaging videos, new music, stories to read and more.” Basically stating that the feed won’t just be what is of interest to you, but also what’s trending in the user’s local area as well as around the rest of the world. Now the changes to the desktop have not been shown just yet, so it’s hard to say what Google has planned here, at least visually. But many are expecting Google to bring the Google Assistant to its homepage, although that is not yet confirmed.
Google wants to be the place where you get all of your news. Even though Google itself is not a news site, it does do a good job at delivering the news to you, and knowing what kind of news you’d be interested in. Since Google does collect data on just about everything you do, it knows you pretty well, and that helps personalize what it shows you. It’s still unclear when these changes will be rolling out to the desktop, but on mobile through the Android and iOS Google apps, the changes are out now in the US and will be rolling out over the next few weeks, internationally. Google hasn’t said much about the changes to desktop yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it announced when it gets closer to its launch.