If you navigate to Google’s Search homepage on your computer in the future, you might see a lot more content there than you see right now.
The Google Search homepage has always been quite minimalistic. Other than a couple of small additions to the search bar, including the ability to search by voice or use the camera, the website has always been quite simple once you scroll down from the header: a text box and two options of “Google Search” or “I’m Feeling Lucky.”
Back in 2018, Google changed that experience on mobile, adding the Discover feed. The feed, which lives under the search bar, offers up personalized news articles, weather, and other content to users. However, the desktop experience remained the same — “Google Search” or “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Of course, the company would add temporary content to the site every now and then to celebrate something like a holiday or a product launch, but most of the time, it stayed old-school Google.
That might be changing now. As reported by MSPowerUser, the company is now testing bringing the Discover feed from the mobile experience straight to the Google Search homepage on the desktop website. In the screenshot below, you can see that the experience shows off news articles, stock prices, and weather.
In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Lara Levin confirmed that the company is indeed testing out bringing the Discover feed to the desktop website. According to Levin, this experiment is currently limited to users in India.
I think that, generally, users around the world have probably gotten used to seeing the Discover feed on mobile, being that it has been there for about five years now. However, it still does feel weird to see that experience make its way to the desktop version of the site since it has remained largely unchanged for…well, almost forever.
The addition of news, stocks, and weather to the Google Search homepage also brings up comparisons to the Bing homepage, which is a bit of a mess. If Google does roll this change out to everyone, I hope they don’t chase Bing here — stick with the AI battle.
