If you are tired of inaccurate or low-quality Google Search results, you're not alone and Google is working on ways to make it better.
What Happened: Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google is working on a new feature that allows users to leave notes about search results.
If this sounds familiar, that is because it looks quite similar to Elon Musk's Community Notes feature on X, formerly Twitter.
This feature allows users to add context and call out misinformation, if any, on posts on X. This is a crowdsourced feature and allows readers to vote on the usefulness of the note added by contributors.
See Also: YouTube's New AI Tool Lets You Clone Famous Singers Using Hums Or Text Prompts
Now, according to @AssembleDebug, known for their teardowns of Google apps, Google Search is getting a new experimental feature. This allows users to add notes they think are essential for news stories and results that show up in the Google app and feed on Android phones.
The new feature not only allows users to add notes, they can also read notes added by other users.
"We've seen in our research that people are interested in what people like them are saying about a given web page. Notes are designed to work hand-in-hand with existing content on the web, adding a new layer of human insights to your search results," Google said in a post.
Interestingly, there's not one single note that shows up in results – Google shows all approved notes added by users, so you can essentially treat them like comments on a story.
Also, unlike Community Notes on X which is restricted to just text and links, the Notes feature in Google Search allows users to add images, GIFs, and even stickers.
Why It Matters: Users have been complaining about Google Search worsening for several years now, forcing them to append the site name of the website they are looking for, or things like "reddit", "quora", and others, to surface results from those websites.
Google has been trying to address its lackluster results by rolling out the AI-powered Search Generative Experience.
The new Notes feature is another step in this direction. Whether it will actually improve the Google Search experience, or if Google will eventually kill it too, remains to be seen.
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