Google’s new search feature that shows you different perspectives (ideally, human ones) in search results will be available on Friday, the company said on Twitter. The perspectives will show up in a tab called, well, “Perspectives.”
“Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, 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, that includes 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 typical set of Google results,” and based on what I’ve seen, that feels like an accurate characterization.
With the Perspectives feed, which started first as a carousel you’d see for certain search results, it feels like Google is trying to keep you from just appending “reddit” to the end of every search to find information from actual humans. That trick had been less useful for a bit because of Reddit communities going dark in protest of Reddit’s planned API changes, and many subreddits are now open again and can actually be seen when you click through them from search.
Given the ongoing conflict between subreddit moderators and Reddit, I do wonder if Google sees an opportunity to get in on some of Reddit’s turf with its Perspectives feed. But the timing may just be a coincidence; when Google announced the new Perspectives tab during Google I/O in May, it said the feature would be rolling out in “the coming weeks.” Here we are, many weeks later.
I still haven’t seen the Perspectives tab on any of my recent searches, but I’m guessing that will change soon.
