The Google Perspectives filter displays relevant videos, blogs, discussions, and other “lived experience” content.
Finding content based on personal experience can be a challenge in a world saturated with information.
When you turn to Google Search for help with a problem, you’re often bombarded with generic advice, scholarly articles, or impersonal suggestions. While this content may be factual and informative, it’s often missing a crucial component – the human experience. Sometimes the top-ranking content doesn’t cover your specific problem or question, leaving you feeling disappointed and frustrated. At this point, we often add “reddit” or “quora” to our search query in an effort to discover content from those respective forums because we know those sources are based on personal experiences.
Finding content from someone who has walked in our shoes, confronted the same issues, and found a solution, can provide a more related solution, a sense of comfort, and even pique your interest in the person who created the content. But combing through pages and pages of generic results to find this type of content can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Recognizing this, Google announced Google Search Perspectives in May 2023 and rolled it out to the United States in June 2023
What is Google Perspectives?
Google Perspectives is a new filter that helps you discover personal stories, discussions, and creator content in search results. It was announced in May 2023 and rolled out to the United States in June 2023.
Here’s what Google Perspectives looks like … hope you’re not hungry : )
Google Perspectives filter displaying curated YouTube videos and Reddit forum threads
With Google Perspectives, people no longer need to refine their search queries in order to discover long and short videos or forum threads. Depending on your query, you may notice the Perspectives filter appear above search results. Tap the filter and Google will display a feed of curated content, including everything from YouTube and TikTok videos to Reddit and Quora forum threads.
The Google Perspectives filter strives to connect you with real-life stories and experiences relevant to your search query, ensuring that the information you find is not only informative but also based on someone’s personal experience.
The content that appears in the Perspectives filter is curated by Google’s AI team to ensure results feature content that’s high-quality and relevant to your search.
Why did Google introduce Perspectives?
A response to the rise of search on TikTok and Instagram
How we use the web can change over time, transcend previously established boundaries, and differ between generations.
We saw this happen during the rise of social media. Social media users began using their preferred social media platform for much more than social networking. For some users, platforms like Instagram became their preferred app for just about everything – connecting with friends, exploring new images, and even searching for information.
That last part is what concerns Google.
In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.
– Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior VP at Google
The introduction of Perspectives seems like an acknowledgment that our search behavior and content preferences are evolving.
We’re not just looking for content that shares information – we’re looking for content that shares a personal experience. This type of content feels more real, more relatable, and more human. Google Perspectives provides a path to discovering this type of content.
A reflection of E-E-A-T
The Google Perspectives filter is a clear reflection of Google’s recent focus on experience.
In December 2022, Google added experience to its quality rater guidelines to form E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. If you’re not familiar, Google’s quality raters use E-E-A-T to assess how trustworthy a page is.
Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic.
Google Search Quality Guidelines (3.4)
Adding experience to the quality rater guidelines indicates Google recognizes it as another dependable characteristic of high-quality content.
With the Perspectives filter, Google aims to help people find more “lived experience” content, so it makes sense to consider experience when determining the page quality rating.
The future of Perspectives
The Google Perspectives filter is still in development and only available to mobile users in the U.S., but I can see it growing over time and maybe even transcending from a filter to something bigger.
The Perspectives filter is just one of many new features that strive to adapt to modern expectations. The Immersive View in Google Maps is another example – it looks like a video game. There’s also Google Generative Search, which uses AI to curate information from multiple sources and provide one clear result to many queries.
Google will continue to release features that embrace modern technology, like AI and augmented reality, align with what younger people want, and redefine expectations of modern search.
Google Passage Ranking is an update to Google's algorithm that allows it to understand and rank individual passages within a page, not just the page as a whole.
