Google’s new search feature that shows you different perspectives (ideally human) in search results will be available Friday, the company said on Twitter. The perspectives appear in a tab called, well, “Perspectives”.
“Tap the filter and you’ll see only long and short videos, images, and written posts that people have shared on discussion forums, Q&A sites, and social media platforms,” Google wrote in a blog post about the feature. from May. Based on a video in Google’s blog post, featuring things like TikTok videos, YouTube videos, websites, tweets, Quora results, and Reddit posts. My colleague David Pierce described the Perspectives results as something that “looks more like Pinterest than a standard set of Google results,” and from what I’ve seen, that feels like an accurate characterization.
With the Perspectives feed, which first started out as a carousel you’d see for certain search results, it feels like Google is trying to prevent you from just adding “reddit” to the end of every search to find information from real people. That trick had been less useful for a while as Reddit communities went on lockdown in protest of Reddit’s planned API changes, and many subreddits are now open again and can actually be seen if you click through them from search.
Given the ongoing conflict between subreddit moderators and Reddit, I wonder if Google sees an opportunity to join Reddit’s territory with its Perspectives feed. But the timing could just be a coincidence; When Google announced the new Perspectives tab at Google I/O in May, it said the feature would roll out in “the coming weeks.” Here we are, many weeks later.
I still haven’t seen the Perspectives tab in any of my recent searches, but I suspect that will change soon.
