Simply put, Google has been the leading Internet search engine for pretty much its entire life.
It has become such an integral part of our lives that we now refer to the act of looking for a bit of information online as “Googling”.
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk of innovation in the online world, from personalized search engines to adaptive results that learn your behavior and give you the results you are more likely to pick out first. Google has been at the forefront of all of these innovations.
In 2012, Google’s innovation struck a new level of personalization that went by pretty unnoticed at first, but through updates and additions, has become one of the major selling points that the company has to offer, both in the mobile and desktop search arenas.
Google Cards is a simplistic innovation by Google that has taken what Google does best – searching the Internet – and combined it with the idea that people now expect to be told what they want to know before they even ask.
Imagine, for example, you are on your way to the airport, but you are stuck in traffic on the way there. You wouldn't have time to go to your airline’s website or to sit on hold for 20 minutes to find the status of your flight. If Google knows that you are supposed to be flying at a certain time on a certain day (through integration with Gmail) it can give you a little index card in your Google Search app on your smartphone (and all indications point to the Cards being available on Chrome in the near future too) showing you the details of your flight, the traffic level on the way to the airport, as well as any recommended routes, times and conditions relevant to your journey.
While Google Cards isn't going to show you information based on every single search you do, your regular search tendencies, favorite places, teams, websites, stocks, cities, etc., will all be used by Google to give you on-the-fly information without you even needing to ask for it.
It may still be early days for this seemingly simple idea, but we may even be headed towards an Internet ecosystem that will allow us to pull up information based on our habits in other social areas as well.
Google has proven that it is not only comfortable with learning your search results, but through the use of location-based tracking, it will even be able to tell you (hopefully sometime in the near future) about the upcoming features at your most frequented theatre, or tell you if there is a table open at your favorite restaurant.
Written by: Wesley Geyer
Creative writer for ATKA SA
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