Google Is Switching Up Its Discover Feed

Your discovery flow always gives you a healthy flow of news and articles – you may even have reached this post even through Discover. Now, however, he is about to get worse.

In the coming weeks, users will start to see articles of social media platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), as well as short videos of YouTube Shorts, interspersed with traditional press articles and blog articles that have been the main content of Discover for some time. “In our research, people told us that they liked to see a mixture of content in Discover, including social videos and publications, in addition to articles,” said Google in its ad.

With this measure, Google aims to create a richer and more varied navigation experience which more closely reflects the way users consume information on the Internet. These positions of change discover to compete more directly with the flows focused on algorithms on social media platforms which have captured an important part of the attention of users.

Google has also deployed a series of new personalization tools designed to give users a granular control on their flows. And an important characteristic is the possibility of following directly creators or specific publishers. When a user finds a source he likes, he can now choose to see more content in the future. To help this decision, the platform now allows users to support the name of a creator to preview their recent articles and social articles before engaging in follow-up.

This new follow -up feature is quite similar to a recently introduced feature in Google Search, which allows you to designate your favorite sources of information. Google wants to move from the suggestion of passive and purely algorithmic content to a more collaborative model where user contribution plays an important role in training their information regime. Google has recently experienced other features aimed at modernizing user flow, including the introduction of AI articles summaries to provide rapid previews and a tool that can automatically generate a personalized podcast based on the content of a user flow.

This is only the latest addition because Google seeks to make discovery more useful. On the other hand, adding social media content can be a double -edged sword. Some authentic information comes directly from social media, but also, platforms like Twitter / X are main breeding grounds for disinformation, and some can infiltrate discovery and have fairly ugly implications. Certain news can be covered by points of sale and discover it, but publications on social networks to discover means that we could mean that we are about to see much more disinformation in our flows. It’s not great.

This feature will take place in the coming weeks.

Source: Engadget