Google ‘Perspectives’ integrates Reddit, YouTube, TikTok and more in search results

1 year ago 125

Alongside its work to integrate more AI features into Search, Google today also announced it’s introducing a new “Perspectives” filter will be coming to the top of some of its Search results when the results “would benefit from others’ experiences,” Google says — like posts on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms, including those with video.

That means it will be easier to access things like Reddit links and YouTube or TikTok videos in search results, among other things, without having to append the name of the platform to your search query.

The company had previously announced a Perspectives feature would launch under Top Stories in the U.S. in English across desktop and mobile. Now it will be available to use across general search results, where relevant.

In addition, Google says when people use the Perspectives filter, they’ll be shown more details about the content creators, including their name, profile pic, and information about the popularity of their content.

These personal stories, discussions, and creator content, will also become available through a dedicated “Perspectives” section that will appear in some search results pages. Here, a “see more” link will be available, taking users to a full page of content that matches their results from these user-generated sources.

Related to this, Google says it’s developing an improved system for understanding and ranking personal content and that written from an expert’s point of view — an acknowledgment, of sorts, that Google’s original system for ranking webpages has decreasing relevance in an era where so much information is being published by individuals on social platforms and other places beyond the traditional website.

Google alluded to this last year, in fact, when an exec speaking at conference noted that Instagram and TikTok were eating into Gogole’s marketshare as younger people often now start some of their queries directly on those platforms, not on Google Search. In other words, Google didn’t have much choice but to adjust to this new paradigm, of how people want to find information if it wants to maintain its relevance in this coming years.

The company says it’s also making improvements to how it ranks “review content” on Search by giving more weight to higher-quality sites that include original information. That could become increasingly necessary as well in the age of AI, where perhaps too much content won’t be original, but AI-created — and a search engine that knows the difference could be very useful.