This September, Google will celebrate its 25th birthday – or silver anniversary. We suspect that, back in 1998, even founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t expect the search engine to prove as successful as it has, and to become such an integral part of our lives.
Although Google is far from perfect, particularly in the way it handles your personal data, the search engine’s enduring popularity can be attributed to the quality of its results and its constant desire to offer faster, smarter ways to scour the web.
From its humble beginnings as a simple search box on a basic white background, Google has added all kinds of useful tools to help you find relevant content as quickly as possible, while not hesitating to ditch features that didn’t work so well.
In this feature, we explain how to use all the best new search tools Google has launched in the past year, or is planning to introduce in the UK imminently – some you may have noticed already while others you have yet to discover. These include innovative additions to both its website and mobile app, which help you search the web better on any device.
We also reveal search tricks that Google doesn’t want you to know, because they interfere with its business model and give you more control of your results than Google intends.
TRY NEW TOOLS BEFORE THEY’RE RELEASED IN THE UK
Apply ‘continuous scrolling’ to search results
At the end of last year, Google added ‘continuous scrolling’ to its desktop search results – a feature already available in its mobile website and app. This saves you having to click through page after page of results to find the content you want. Instead, when you reach the bottom of a page, the next set of results will load automatically.
Continuous scrolling is different from ‘infinite scrolling’ because it only shows you the first six pages of entries before you need to click ‘More results’ to view the next page. This is presumably to keep your browser’s memory usage down and prevent your search results from becoming unwieldy.
The feature is currently only available to Google users in the US, but you can try it now by changing your region settings. Click ‘Settings’ in the bottom-right corner of the Google homepage and select ‘Search settings’ in the menu that opens.
