Google search VP Ben Gomes explains mobile revamp

Ben Gomes, Vice President of Search Engineering at Google, at the Googleplex campus in Mountain View.

Google is making search results in its mobile app look more like a news feed as it battles Facebook and Amazon for the attention of — and information about — online consumers.

This week the technology giant updated its app to add content from more sources to search results. For example, data on local events, eateries and weather will be available alongside regular search results.

Users will also be able “follow” an area of interest with the touch of a button. Having users input this information could help Google further tailor search results and offer better information to advertisers. This could help Google compete in mobile advertising against Facebook, which collects detailed information about users based on their likes and preferences, then uses this information to target ads.

Google, a unit of Alphabet, also tweaked how it presents this search information, especially for users of its Pixel smartphone, who can access the feed by “swiping left” from their home screen. It looks more like news feeds from Facebook, Twitter, or Apple News, and features “cards” with specific sets of information like sports scores and news headlines. Some of these cards will contain information from other Google services, like YouTube.

The idea is to make the feed “an extension of Google search,” said Shashidhar Thakur, vice president of search, in a presentation to reporters earlier this week. The goal is “to keep you in the know even when you’re not searching,” Thakur said.

The updates to a format Google first unveiled last December come a day after Amazon unveiled Spark, its own feed of product photos and stories designed to help subscribers to its Prime service find products to buy more easily.

And they come more than a year after Facebook first began experimenting with a new shopping tab in its own news feed.