Google Launches Perspectives – A Search Feed Powered by Humans

For some time now, Google has been working on improving its search engine. During the Google I/O event, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled an AI-powered search experience that provides users with more relevant results and detailed information in a unified feed, with the help of an AI chatbot. Recently, Google announced another feature that allows users to view search results consisting entirely of human perspectives, created by everyday people and experts, similar to a Reddit thread. Interestingly, this announcement coincides with Reddit facing significant protests from its user base, moderators, and third-party apps over its new API pricing changes. Could Google Perspectives serve as a viable alternative to Reddit? Let’s explore this possibility.

Today, June 24, Google announced in a tweet: “Last month at #GoogleIO, we shared updates to search to help you discover and explore different perspectives from experts and everyday people. Today you can try it out.” While the feature hasn’t been rolled out to the general public, if you’d like to check them out, you can sign up for Google Labs and join the search waiting list here.

Google Perspectives adds a human touch to search results

A new filter is added on top of search results (a space with videos, images, news, books, and other tags that help you get a filtered search), called Perspectives. When the filter is tapped, users will see “exclusively long and short videos, images, and written messages that people have shared on forums, Q&A sites, and social media platforms,” Google explained in a post.

It further added: “We also display additional information about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile picture or information about the popularity of their content”.

This filter is useful when you are not looking for the most accurate information but rely on subjective experience. For example, you’ve moved to a new city, but you don’t know anyone. You can search for “how to meet new people in this city” and turn on the Perspectives filter to see the city’s residents share the answer to the question, which can be much more useful than a blog post on a travel site.

Google has also said that it will update its ranking system to bring real information, which may be hidden in a comment on a forum or a little-known blog, to the top of the results.

A reddit alternative?

While the use case is quite similar to how someone searches for threads on Reddit, Google doesn’t really provide a space where people can come together to create communities or threads. However, with the introduction of Perspectives, it can do so later.

But it can be used more often by those who wanted to use third-party apps and now instead of going through the Reddit app or website, they would like to ask their questions here and find instant relevant answers.