Google It has changed a lot since its beginnings and not always for the better. The SERPacronym in English for Search Engine Results Pagehave gone from showing a dozen links per page, which the Google algorithm considers most appropriate to the user's search intention, to delivering a long series of modules with different types of information that precede these. It is a process that began in 2007, almost a decade after the launch of the Google Search, and that In 2024 it will undergo the biggest change in its history.
These are the AI Overviewsfor the moment only available openly in the United States, and which constitute a new module on the results page with AI-generated summaries. It is not something short, like the question and answer sections or the selection of videos or featured news on a topic, and It joins many other contents other than what have always been strictly considered search results..
A search that generates AI Overviews, which are not all, show the first linkto the old usage, in that before infinite scrolling arrived in the Search It was the second page of results.. And the user, depending on the search, does not find a traditional list of websites with the information they demand. until what would be the fourth page.
Google has walked this path little by little. In 2007 introduced the Universal search, whereby results that previously only appeared in their respective tabs – such as images, maps or videos – began to take up space on the main page. In 2010 started including social media updates like Twitter about ongoing events in a new module. In 2012he Knowledge graph which is the information panel that appears to the right of the results with details such as biographies and historical data, often taken from Wikipedia. In 2014the Featured Snippets which are boxes that appear at the top of search results with a brief response to the user's query, coming from a relevant web page. And it has continued like this so that, today, Google can offer more than two dozen types of results to a search.
And although many of these modules may be useful, there are still users who prefer choose for themselves instead of accepting the information that Google provides chewed up. And it seems that it has been remembered again with the launch this week of a new results filter.
Is called Web and returns us to the Seeker of yesteryear. With only links to web pages that the user must rate, with the title and a small excerpt of information, and decide if it is what he is looking for, not what Google says. To access this option, you just have to select the Web filter from those that appear under the search box.