Windows 10: New Activity Cards to pick up where you left off on Google Search

Brink · Jan 9, 2019

While we’ve probably all turned to Google to settle a bet, often we need more than just a quick answer.

You might be looking for information to help you complete a longer-running task, whether it’s meal planning for a new food regimen, researching new stretching routines for post-gym recovery or picking up a new hobby. You might come back to Search to find information on the same topic, hoping to retrace your steps or discover new, related ideas.

To help you with these ongoing search journeys, we’re launching new activity cards to help you pick up where you left off. If you’re logged into your Google account and search for topics and hobbies like cooking, interior design, fashion, skincare and beauty, fitness, photography and more, you may find an activity card at the top of the results page that provides easy ways to continue your exploration.

You’ll find links to pages you’ve visited in the past along with searches you’ve done. From there, you can easily click back to that recipe that you tried and loved, or re-issue a search to discover new facets of that topic.

If you want to mark a page to read or reference later, just touch and hold the link to quickly add items on your activity card to a collection. You can access your collections by tapping the menu on the top left of the Search page (on mobile web), or through the bottom bar of the Google app.

You can control what appears in your activity card by pressing to delete an item or turn off cards by tapping the 3-dot icon. For more options to customize your Search experience, you can access your full history and settings right in Search.

Activity cards will roll out today on mobile web and the Google app in English in the U.S. As you’re looking to build new habits or pick up new tasks in the new year--whether sticking to an exercise regimen, sprucing up your winter wardrobe, or collecting new ideas for your home--we hope this new feature helps you along your way and makes your search history more accessible and useful.
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Source: Pick up where you left off on Search

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Brink · Jan 9, 2019

New Activity Cards, Collections, and more features in Google Search

We’ve spent the last 20 years optimizing Search so it works really well for getting quick information. You ask what the capital of Costa Rica is, and we’ll tell you it’s San José. But in life we often take longer journeys, and people turn to Search for help in these moments too.

Many searches are related to longer sessions that span multiple days, with people coming back to Search to find the latest updates on a topic or explore the range of content available. For example, you might be planning a trip, and searching for information about a destination over the course of a month. Or perhaps you regularly search for “easy dinner recipes” to help you plan you meals for the week.

We can do better to help in these journeys, so today we’re sharing new features that help you resume tasks where you left off, keep track of ideas and content that you found useful, and get relevant suggestions of things to explore next. All of this marks a fundamental transformation in the way Search understands interests and longer journeys to help you find information.

Retrace your steps with activity cards

Retracing your steps online can be really difficult. While we’ve always made your Search history available in your account settings, you should be able to access it when you’re searching, so it can be useful to you in the moment.

Now, a new activity card will help you pick up from where you left off in Search. When you revisit a query related to a task you've started in the past, we’ll show you a card with relevant pages you’ve already visited and previous queries you’ve done on this topic. This helps you retrace your steps when you might not remember which sites had that useful information you’d found earlier.

We’re intelligently showing this card only when it’s useful; it won’t appear for every search. And you’ll have full control over it—you can easily remove results from your history, pause seeing this card, or choose not to see it all together. This new activity card will be available in Search later this year.

Keep track of your searches with Collections

Another way to more easily navigate long search journeys is by adding useful content to Collections. Collections in Search help you keep track of content you’ve visited, such as a website or article or image, and quickly get back to it later.

Now, with an improved Collections experience, you can add your content from an activity card directly to Collections. This makes it even easier to keep track of and organize the content you want to revisit.

We’ve also added content suggestions to help you explore topics further, based on the other content you’ve saved and things you’ve searched for. We’ll start rolling out this new Collections experience later this fall.

Dynamic organization of Search results

Every search journey is different, and especially if you’re not familiar with the topic, it’s not always clear what your next search should be to help you learn more. So we’re introducing a new way of dynamically organizing search results that helps you more easily determine what information to explore next.

Rather than presenting information within a set of predetermined categories, we can intelligently show the subtopics that are most relevant to what you’re searching for and make it easy to explore information from the web, all with a single search.

So if you’re searching for Pugs, for example, you’ll now be able to see the tabs for the most common and relevant subtopics, like breed characteristics and names, right at the top. But if you search for something else, even a different kind of dog, like Yorkshire Terriers, you’ll see options grooming tips and breed history.

The best part about this feature is that it continues to stay fresh and learns over time. As new information is published to the web, these tabs stay up to date to reflect what’s most relevant to that topic. This dynamic page organization is already live for a variety of topics, and we’ll expand to more in the future.

A new Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph

To enable all of these updates, Search has to understand interests and how they progress over time. So we’ve taken our existing Knowledge Graph—which understands connections between people, places, things and facts about them—and added a new layer, called the Topic Layer, engineered to deeply understand a topic space and how interests can develop over time as familiarity and expertise grow.

The Topic Layer is built by analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a given topic and develops hundreds and thousands of subtopics. For these subtopics, we can identify the most relevant articles and videos—the ones that have shown themselves to be evergreen and continually useful, as well as fresh content on the topic. We then look at patterns to understand how these subtopics relate to each other, so we can more intelligently surface the type of content you might want to explore next.

All of this enables experiences that make it easier than ever to explore your interests, even if you don’t have your next search in mind. We’re excited for the potential of this technology to provide more opportunities for discovery and exploration in Search.
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Source: Helping you along your Search journeys

fussybob · Jan 9, 2019

IE11 Google Toolbar no auto search suggestions, no search history?

Since the last Win 10 update my Google Toolbar won't list any search suggestions as I type and there is no search history listed. The Google tool bar will allow a search, but after a few searches no search history shows and no "clear search" button is listed either.

I have turnd on "Suggest searches as you type", and "store search histroy on my computer" in the Google Toolbar options.

Any suggestions to fix this?

JosephHHarrisonJr · Jan 9, 2019

Google as default search

On my new Samsung Notebook 9 I want to make Google the default search engine in Internet Explorer. I open Explorer, click on tools, click on manage add-ons and then click on search providers. That shows me a list which includes Bing (twice) and Google.
In the far right column under "search suggestions" Bing is listed as "enabled" and Google is listed as "not available." How do I make Google available?

Windows 10: New Activity Cards to pick up where you left off on Google Search

New Activity Cards to pick up where you left off on Google Search

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