Last year we introduced the Google feed to surface relevant content to you, even when you’re not searching. It’s grown dramatically over the past year: more than 800 million people use the feed each month to stay up to date on their interests. Today—as a part of three fundamental shifts in how we think about Search—we’re launching a major update to this experience, including a new name, a fresh look, and a brand-new set of features.

A new name and look

Since launching the feed, we’ve made it our goal to help you uncover fresh and interesting content about things that matter to you. Now, we’re giving the feed a name that reflects this mission: Discover. With this new name comes a fresh design that makes exploring your interests easier than ever.

New topic headers explain why you’re seeing a particular card in Discover, and whenever a topic catches your eye, you can dive deeper to explore more on that topic.

Next to each topic name is a Discover icon, which you’ll also start to see in Search for an ever-growing set of topics. You can tap “Follow” to start seeing more about that topic in your experience.

Evergreen content

In addition to this new look, you’ll also see new types of content in Discover. You’ll find more videos and fresh visual content, as well as evergreen content—articles and videos that aren’t new to the web, but are new to you.

For example, when you’re planning your next trip, Discover might show an article with the best places to eat or sights to see. Suddenly, a travel article published three months ago is timely for you. This can also be useful as you’re taking up a new hobby or going deeper on a long-time interest. Using the Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph, Discover can predict your level of expertise on a topic and help you further develop those interests. If you’re learning to play guitar, for example, you might see beginner content about learning chords. If you’re already a skilled musician, you may see a video on more advanced techniques.

Discover is unique because it's one step ahead: it helps you come across the things you haven't even started looking for.

More context and control

Because Discover is all about you and your interests, there are now even more ways to customize what you see.

Just tap on the control icon to indicate that you want more or less content on that topic. You’ll continue to see content from a range of sources on any given topic, helping you explore new ideas surrounding your interests.

When it comes to news, we believe it’s important that everyone has access to the same information. Discover uses the same technology as Full Coverage in Google News to bring you a variety of perspectives on the latest news.

Discover in multiple languages

With this redesign, Discover will now be even more useful to people who speak multiple languages. You may like to use recipes in Spanish and read sports in English, and you will see content in your language of preference for each interest.

We’re starting with support for English and Spanish in the U.S. and will expand to more languages and countries soon.

Coming to google.com on your phone

The Google homepage has always been a place to ask questions and search for information you’re interested in. Now, it will be even easier to keep up with your interests, because Discover is coming to google.com on all mobile browsers.

Think of it as your new mobile homepage where you can not only search, but also discover useful, relevant information and inspiration from across the web for the topics you care about most. This will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

We hope you find this refreshed experience helpful as you discover your next hobby and further develop your interests with Search.

Growing up in India, there was one good library in my town that I had access to—run by the British Council.  It was modest by western standards, and I had to take two buses just to get there. But I was lucky, because for every child like me, there were many more who didn’t have access to the same information that I did. Access to information changed my life, bringing me to the U.S. to study computer science and opening up huge possibilities for me that would not have been available without the education I had.  

When Google started 20 years ago, our mission was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That seemed like an incredibly ambitious mission at the time—even considering that in 1998 the web consisted of just 25 million pages (roughly the equivalent of books in a small library).

Fast forward to today, and now we index hundreds of billions of pages in our index—more information than all the libraries in the world could hold. We’ve grown to serve people all over the world, offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries.

Through all of this, we’ve remained grounded in our mission. In fact, providing greater access to information is as core to our work today as it was when we first started. And while almost everything has changed about technology and the information available to us, the core principles of Search have stayed the same.

• First and foremost, we focus on the user. Whether you’re looking for recipes, studying for an exam, or finding information on where to vote, we’re focused on serving your information needs.

• We strive to give you the most relevant, highest quality information as quickly as possible. This was true when Google started with the Page Rank algorithm—the foundational technology to Search. And it’s just as true today.

• We see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before. Given this scale, the only way to provide Search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.

• Finally, we rigorously test every change we make. A key part of this testing is the rater guidelines which define our goals in search, and which are publicly available for anyone to see. Every change to Search is evaluated by experimentation and by raters using these guidelines. Last year alone, we ran more than 200,000 experiments that resulted in 2,400+ changes to search. Search will serve you better today than it did yesterday, and even better tomorrow.

As Google marks our 20th anniversary, I wanted to share a first look at the next chapter of Search, and how we’re working to make information more accessible and useful for people everywhere. This next chapter is driven by three fundamental shifts in how we think about Search:

• The shift from answers to journeys: To help you resume tasks where you left off and learn new interests and hobbies, we’re bringing new features to Search that help you with ongoing information needs.

• The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information: We can surface relevant information related to your interests, even when you don’t have a specific query in mind.

• And the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information: We’re bringing more visual content to Search and completely redesigning Google Images to help you find information more easily.

Underpinning each of these are our advancements in AI, improving our ability to understand language in ways that weren’t possible when Google first started. This is incredibly exciting, because over 20 years ago when I studied neural nets at school, they didn’t actually work very well...at all!

But we’ve now reached the point where neural networks can help us take a major leap forward from understanding words to understanding concepts. Neural embeddings, an approach developed in the field of neural networks, allow us to transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document. We call this technique neural matching. This can enable us to address queries like: “why does my TV look strange?” to surface the most relevant results for that question, even if the exact words aren’t contained in the page. (By the way, it turns out the reason is called the soap opera effect).

Finding the right information about my TV is helpful in the moment. But AI can have much more profound effects. Whether it’s predicting areas that might be affected in a flood, or helping you identify the best job opportunities for you, AI can dramatically improve our ability to make information more accessible and useful.

I’ve worked on Search at Google since the early days of its existence. One of the things that keeps me so inspired about Search all these years is our mission and how timeless it is. Providing greater access to information is fundamental to what we do, and there are always more ways we can help people access the information they need. That’s what pushes us forward to continue to make Search better for our users. And that’s why our work here is never done.

Search has been helping you settle bets since 1998 (turns out there is some caffeine in decaf coffee), but now that we’re 20 years in, we’ve built dozens of other useful features and tools to help you get through your day. Let’s jump into some of these secret (and not-so-secret) tricks to up your Search game.

Search as your everyday sidekick

Helping you navigate important decisions

Time-saving tools

For the savvy searchers

But right now, I’m not feeling that advanced—so will go back to searching for cake recipes for Google’s birthday.

Imagine you’re remodeling your kitchen, and you want information about how quartz compares to granite for your new countertops. Sure, Google can tell you what quartz and granite are, but that’s perhaps not what you had in mind. Chances are you’re hoping to learn more about the differences in cost, benefits, and durability of each, and may be looking for guidance on other subtopics to explore.

For these types of queries, we’re introducing a new way to get you to relevant information fast and help you get a glimpse of multiple aspects of a topic with a single search.

Now when you search for something like [quartz vs. granite], you’ll see a panel with a set of relevant subtopics to explore. As another example, when you search [emergency fund], you'll get a quick view of information that relates to the recommended size, purpose, and importance of an emergency fund, and you can easily click the links to these relevant sources to learn more. This new format is meant to help guide you with what we understand to be common, useful aspects of the topic and help you sift through the information available, all with the goal of delivering the most relevant results for you.

These new panels are automatically generated based on our understanding of these topics from content on the web, and we hope you find them useful as they roll out over the next few days.

Like anyone who has searched for a job at some point in their lives, I know from experience how hard it can be to find the right role. You can spend days scouring job postings that are scattered across the web, flicking through newspapers or dropping into local employers, yet still struggle to find a job that suits you. Employers may be feeling the impact of this too: three quarters of U.K. employers face talent shortages and have issues filling open positions with the right candidate.

Today, more people are turning to Google to find information about their next role. We have a long history of using our technology to connect people with information, so we’re excited to bring a new job search experience to Google to connect people in the U.K. to job opportunities. This new feature in Search lets you more easily explore jobs from across the web and find job postings that suit your needs and skills.

Starting today, when you search for “jobs near me,” “teaching jobs,” or similar queries in English in the U.K., you’ll have the option to click through to a feature that lets you explore jobs from across the web that meet your unique needs. You can access salary information, reviews and ratings of the employer and different options to apply for a job, or use a location filter to see jobs in the areas that are convenient for you. Thanks to Google Maps, if you’re signed in, you’ll even be able to see how long it would take to commute to a job from your home.

Searching for a job can take time, and keeping up with new jobs that are posted throughout the day can be impossible. Now in Google Search you can save individual jobs with a single tap so that they are accessible across any of your devices. And if you step away from your job search, you can stay in the loop on opportunities that interest you by turning on alerts to receive an email notification whenever new jobs arrive.

The new jobs experience in Search is the result of deep collaboration with the job-matching industry, and benefits both employers and job seekers. We first introduced this experience in the U.S. last year, and it’s now live in several countries. Since launching it, we’ve seen 130 percent more companies showing jobs in Search and connected tens of millions of people around the world to new job opportunities.

In the U.K., we’re working with organizations from across the job-matching industry to bring you the most comprehensive listing of jobs, like The Guardian Jobs, Reed.co.uk, Haymarket, Gumtree, The Telegraph, Reach plc's totallylegal, CV-Library and totaljobs.com. This means anyone searching for jobs on Google will see postings from these sites and many others from across the web as soon as they’re posted. To ensure even more jobs are listed over time, we’re publishing open documentation for all jobs providers detailing how to make their job openings discoverable in this new feature.

This launch also builds on the commitment we made last year to help 100,000 people in the U.K.find a job or grow in their career by 2020. We’re doing that through our Google Digital Garage program, which gives anyone free training in digital skills and products to help grow their career, business or confidence. So far we’ve helped tens of thousands of people find their next job through free training at four city-center hubs and with partners across the U.K.

Whether you’re a recent graduate looking for your first job, a parent supporting a growing family, or simply hunting for your dream role, we hope this new experience on Google will help make the job search simpler and connect you with your next job.