Google Discover dips its toe in the pool of social media

Google Discover represents a particularly convenient way to stay up to date on the latest news, just one little swipe away from your phone’s home screen. But like any aggregation service, its value lies in how successfully it’s able to surface the content that’s most relevant to our interests. So far, that’s basically consisted of stories posted to new sites, as well as some YouTube videos. But now we’re hearing about a new test that could be about to turn Discover on its head.

Right now this appears to only be a limited experiment that select users are seeing, but for those affected, Discover now includes posts from social media. In the examples shared by 9to5Google we see Discover pulling together posts from Instagram and X, and displaying them is a scrollable horizontal carousel. That same look is being applied to YouTube videos, as well, including full-length content — not just Shorts.

In addition to being able to tap through to access individual posts, Discover’s also showing a “Latest posts from…” banner up top that lets you see everything someone’s account has been up to, rather than the initially curated selection.

Maybe you can’t get enough of social media, but we imagine that for a lot of Discover users, this could be one very controversial change, should it ever roll out widely. We recently asked Discover users about their feelings towards the service, and the results have been pretty mixed. Go ahead and add your vote, and see where the totals are now:

Google seems to be throwing everything at the wall with Discover lately in the hopes of seeing what will stick, like that edge-to-edge UI we saw debut earlier in the month. That one’s already been attracting a whole lot of negative attention.

Should Google expand this social content test, as well, we’ll be very curious to see if it gets a similar reception, or if it actually ends up proving to offer a welcome change of pace.