You won’t need a new query every time
Google has nearly perfected the art of Search, offering a plethora of ways to look up information. Sometimes, though, results aren’t quite what we expected: maybe our search terms were overly broad, or Google’s understanding of our browsing history and patterns pointed it in a different direction. Normally, we’d take a moment to refine our search, trying some alternate keywords. But now, Google is streamlining that approach on mobile, letting you refine results with just a few quick taps.
When you use Search in the Google app or on the mobile web interface, you can filter by the type of results you seek — images, video, news, etc. Google is now expanding this list of filters with a few new, dynamically populated options, called topics. If you search for something like “dinner ideas,” you may see topics like “healthy” and “easy” show up as suggestions. Hitting the plus button on the “healthy” option will start refining your results, and other related topics like “vegetarian” and “quick” may appear next.
Based on your original query and the topics you select, new topics will change automatically to help you narrow the options. Thanks to the quality of Google’s results, you may not need to, but it does look easier to retrace your footsteps and explore other possibilities with these new topic-style Search filters. The feature reminds us of multisearch and multisearch near me with Google Lens, but with just text queries instead of images.
Using these new topic-style search filters sure beats spamming the back gesture and typing out new queries, but we are a little disappointed it’s only rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming days — it would’ve been great to see this as an option on Search for desktop, and considering the other recent improvements to the search engine, we still have hope.
