Google has officially started killing “Google Now”

Today Google has officially started killing “Google Now”  however it’s not getting rid of the functionality. Last December Google introduced a new “feed experience” as part of Google Now, which featured topics in one tab and a second tab for personal information and updates, such as travel plans and meetings. In the rollout today, (Google app for Android and iOS) that two-tab structure is preserved, but the feed is becoming richer and more controllable. Google, the world's largest search engine and a unit of Alphabet Inc, said the changes would begin rolling out in the United States on Wednesday and other countries in the coming weeks.

 

The new offering is called "Google Feed," a name that may conjure comparisons to Facebook's "News Feed," a feature on Facebook used to browse updates from friends, family and other sources. It is rolling out its take on news feed which is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and various other content. The feed items are drawn from your search history and topics you choose to follow, is designed to turn Google’s app into a destination for browsing as well as search. Google is hoping you’ll or check it throughout the day for quick hits of news and information.

 

Google previewed its new feed in December, when it introduced the feature to its Android app.

With the introduction of the feed, the Google Now brand is going away, and the updates it used to contain are moving to a secondary tab called updates to your interests. In a demo at Google’s offices in San Francisco on Tuesday, a product manager’s feed included articles about the Oakland Athletics, a trending article about the Tour de France, and a 10-month old blog post about a classical musician who she had previously seen in concert.

 

In most feeds, a 10-month-old blog post would appear stale and unwelcome. Google says it’s a sign of the company’s strengths — it can reach into the long tail of articles on the web, and surface them to audiences that missed them the first time around whereas Facebook and Twitter give priority to latest updates;

You can customize the feed by tapping the three dots on top of each card. From there you can follow a subject or share the item on other social networks. You can also tell Google you’re “done with this story” and avoid seeing future updates, or tell it you don’t want to see any more articles from a particular publisher. You can’t follow individual publishers today, but publishers will surely clamor for it, and Google told me it will consider adding that feature eventually.

For now, Google says there won’t be ads in the feed, although I imagine it would love to put them there eventually. Google is an ad business and it’s running out of places to put new ads on m

But with each passing year, we have had fewer reasons to open the Google app. Native apps from Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and others command more of our attention, making us less likely to begin our queries at the search bar. More recently, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana have been built into our device hardware, allowing us to bypass Google and search with our voice.

Viewed in that light, a Google feed was all but inevitable. Google has very successfully transitioned to mobile, which wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Now it wants to give users more reasons to check-in daily and new pathways into search. It’s not clear how widely Now was being used by the bulk of Google’s mobile audience.

While it may not seem like a huge update — depending on how much you use the Google app, you may not even notice the new feed at first (it will also be available on Pixel phones via the Pixel launcher) — Google clearly has big plans for the feature.

Beyond the mobile app experience, Google said that it would be bringing the feed to the desktop version of the Chrome in the near future, though it didn’t show that off. I’m imagining it as the reincarnation of iGoogle, a personalized start page that was shuttered in 2012 — the same year Now was introduced. The question is how quickly Google can improve it — and whether its users, whose lives are already dominated by feeds, will make room for another one.

 

 

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