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Update: Improved image capture for demonstration
Google Discover provides so much valuable information in a timely manner to users that its value can’t be understated in the modern DNA of Google as a whole. Taking all of the world’s information and organizing it to make it as universally accessible and useful as possible is no easy feat, and these automation tools really do help with that mission the company set into place so many years ago.
From finding what movie or TV show to watch to checking the weather, news, and stocks, among many other things, Discover (R.I.P. Google Now) is just great all around. A while back, Google began testing Discover-style widgets on the homepage of the Search engine, but they disappeared shortly thereafter. Now, it seems they’re back for some users!
I snapped this photo a few weeks ago using my phone as I pointed it at my Windows 11 machine running Chrome Stable, so please excuse the quality (or lack thereof!). As you can see, “Meet the new Google.com” shows “Make this space yours” with options to customize each of the following widgets seen to the right of that leftmost block.
Weather, top News stories, “What to watch”, trending stocks and more as well as a location indicator all sit below the Google Search bar. My hope is to see a straight up Google Discover news feed in the same vein as that which shows on the new tab page in Chrome for Android, but since the company may want to keep this as clean as possible, I don’t imagine that will happen anytime soon.
There’s no telling when or if this set of widgets will show up for all users, but one thing is for sure and that’s the fact that Google has not given up on the idea just yet despite having pulled the update once before. I sure do miss “iGoogle” as a dashboard with all of the useful information it delivered, so if this made a comeback in the form of Google Discover widgets on the Search homepage, that would bring me much joy as well as automation – something the old system never relied on.
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