Google is a household name for a reason. This tech company not only offers one of the best search engines on the web, but also has a laser-focus on enhancing the overall user experience via regular updates, overhauls, and new products.
The tech giant rolled out a few new updates over the last week, and they’re pretty exciting because they further enhance two of its most beloved services: Google Search and YouTube, the massive video platform that was purchased by Google back in 2006. RELATED: 6 practical reasons to use Incognito mode.
Google didn’t just make those changes, though. It also rebranded one of its G Suite products, Google+, giving it both a facelift and a new purpose. Let’s take a look at the changes you can expect to find with these new Google updates.
What updates did Google roll out?
As we mentioned, Google has rolled out updates to a few of its services over the last few days, and you may find these changes to be pretty useful — especially when it comes to the update to Google Search.
The new Google Search update
Chances are you already use Google Search on a regular basis. It is one of the most comprehensive and easy to navigate search engines, after all, so it may be hard to picture Google Search needing an update. But it did, and the update is awesome.
One of the new features of Google Search centers around Featured Snippet boxes, which are the short boxes of information that appear when you search in Google, with a link to the full article underneath. If you click on the Featured Snippet in the Google Search results, it will take you to the web page with the full article text that contains the information you’re looking for.
You may aslo like: Google’s YouTube free video builder
The problem in the past has been that you can find the information you’re looking for in a search and see it in the Featured Snippet box, but the information can be difficult to locate in the article text when you visit the linked page. This new feature resolves the issue by highlighting the specific text content you’re looking for in the article on the linked page.
Google has been testing out this feature for the last couple of years, and as of this week, it’s finally live on both desktop and mobile. According to Google, this feature should work on most browsers — but it may not work on all.
“There’s no markup needed by webmasters to enable a featured snippet [but if] a browser doesn’t support the underlying technology needed, or if our systems can’t confidently determine exactly where within a page to direct a click, clicking a featured snippet will take a user to the top of the source web page,” a Google support page said.
Continue reading →