One of the most notable steps Google took last month to prepare for the next 20 years of Search is Google Discover. A rebrand of the Google Feed, it is part of the company’s efforts to surface information without users actively having to ask for it. Google Discover is now beginning to roll out in google.com on mobile devices.
I don’t quite understand this strong desire to shove “feeds” into every single possible product. Am I just old?
when you show info to the user then you give him the chance to interact with them. From your interaction with info then data are created that correlate your action with the info, so you have … big data! And from that big data you train machine learning models. It’s really simple. Data produces information and information produces a knowledge base that can produce $$$.
Google search has become steadily worse the last few years, and now it is as if they aren’t even trying: Here’s a page that contains some of the most common words you searched for but not that single most important word that’s exceedingly rare.
I suppose this is just another step in the evolution of giving the user what it doesn’t want.
Yay, another service that will most likely just make things slower while adding zero value for me.
The ONLY feed i have so far discovered that (for me) actually have a somewhat fair success rate is the one in Youtube.
What makes most feeds fail for me, is that they show things similar to what i was looking for in the past. The problem with this is that i usually found what i was looking for and am now done. As for domain specific articles and news, curated blogs, like Chris Alcocks The Morning Brew has a much higher signal to noise ratio than any specific site or feed i have found for .NET stuff.
Ironically this part about following a trend is exactly why the feed in Youtube generally works for me, and it seems adaptive enough to notice that hey, he switched from wood working videos to videos about dudes making swords, with the random tech video, gaming video and military history video thrown in to mix things up.
Thom, lots of us like to open our phones to look at something that interests us without having anything particular in mind. Chrome’s feed is good IMO.
> Thom, lots of us like to open our phones to look at something that interests us without having anything particular in mind.
I don’t know if that’s a generational/age-related thing but wow, it never occurred to me there were people who did that. No wonder people have their eyes glued to the damn phone. Mine sits in my pocket unless it’s ringing or I’m reading my email. The rest of the time I don’t give a F and I damn well don’t need anybody “steering” my idle time.
Thom, I think the way you and I are used to doing things (yeah, we’re older) is we go looking for data – weather reports, news, looking up stuff that interests us.
But the world has become so flooded with data in the past couple of decades that people are overwhelmed with data (most of it useless). Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, advertisements, restaurant recommendations, Instagram photos, etc. It’s in people’s faces all the time.
People are so saturated with data being fed to them every time they open a browser or their phone, they are probably searching for information less. People aren’t going out and specifically reading newspaper articles (on line or in print), for example, they’re getting news from their friends’ social media feeds.
Google is, I believe, trying to counter balance the relative lack of searching by sending news stories and ideas and videos to people. They don’t want to be crowded out of the information flow, so they’re adding to the tsunami.
I disabled Google Now a while ago, so I can simply circle the screens on my phone. Web searches I do directly from my Firefox mobile URL bar, so won’t encounter their Feeds any time soon.
With that said, before disabling it, when I accidentally landed on Google Now, there were 1-2 stories somewhat interesting to read, but it was almost always a bad time to read them, because I was doing something else.
..to create habits.
My very old father-in-law rise every morning TO BUY his newspaper. Hardly able to understand their writings anymore.
That’s sort of “feed”.
On Going for a walk at any Western City, I’m being “fed”.
We Are like those paté gooses
Western Nihl related to this. (We get bloated)…
Edited 2018-10-30 15:38 UTC