Google’s new search feature that shows you different (ideally human) perspectives in search results will be available on Friday, the company said on Twitter. The outlook will appear in a tab called, well, “Outlook”.
“Tap on the filter and you’ll see exclusively long and short videos, images, and written messages that people have shared on chat rooms, Q&A sites, and social media platforms,” Google wrote in a blog post about the feature. from May. Based on a video from Google Blog, which includes things like TikTok videos, YouTube videos, websites, tweets, Quora results, and Reddit posts. My colleague David Pierce described the Perspectives results as something “more like Pinterest than a typical set of Google results”, and from what I’ve seen, that sounds like an accurate characterization.
With the Perspectives feed, which started off as a carousel that you would see for certain search results, it looks like Google is trying to stop you from just adding “reddit” to the end of every search to find information from real humans . This tip had been less useful for a while due to the obscurity of Reddit communities protesting Reddit’s planned API changes, and many subreddits are now open again and can actually be seen when you click on it from search.
Given the ongoing dispute between subreddit moderators and Reddit, I wonder if Google sees an opportunity to enter Reddit territory with its Insights feed. But the timing may just be a coincidence; When Google announced the new Perspectives tab during Google I/O in May, it said the feature would be rolling out in “the coming weeks.” Here we are, several weeks later.
I still haven’t seen the Insights tab on any of my recent searches, but I suspect that will change soon.
