It would seem that Google wants its shiny, new Side Panel to be even more all-encompassing than we had initially suspected. Yes, it stores bookmarks, Google Lens, History Journeys, Reading list and more, but that’s just not enough, now is it?
According to Leopeva64 on Twitter, who initially brought this to our attention, Google is also testing out another integration for the right (or left) hand side of your browser! As you can see below, the ‘About this page’ text you normally receive regarding the website’s developer will now appear in the Side Panel.
Leopeva64 tested this with YouTube and was shown a breakdown from Wikipedia, as well as where the site was first indexed (Obviously, it’s Google in this case), and related web results. We previously reported on this ‘Knowledge-graph’ style of information delivery appearing in the browser’s Omnibox lock icon for a website.
Moving all of this data from the padlock as a dropdown dialogue box to the Side Panel does feel like a great move, in my opinion, but I do continue to be concerned with the company ‘overstuffing’ the new, popular tool with just way too much. At some point, I imagine it will become less useful because the user will need to navigate between several different things within it, but I’m hopeful that Google will keep implementing a contextual setup as it’s done with Lens to prevent this from happening.
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