Last September, Google Search marked its 20th anniversary and the company laid out plans for the engine’s future. Besides bringing Discover to the web and making Lens available in Images, Google discussed “dynamic organization” for Search results. This feature is now making its way to the desktop web via a subtopics sidebar.
Starting with mobile last year, Google began “dynamically organizing search results that helps you more easily determine what information to explore next.”
Rather than presenting information within a set of predetermined categories, we can intelligently show the subtopics that are most relevant to what you’re searching for and make it easy to explore information from the web, all with a single search.
On mobile, these subtopics are presented as a carousel under the Knowledge Graph panel. Each is essentially its own feed of related results and lets users search without having to manually enter another query.
Subtopics
This has been live on Android and iOS for the past several months, but it now looks to be coming to the desktop web. One Reddit user today spotted a left Search sidebar that — like on mobile — specifies the topic and type of query. In this case, it’s “Halo Infinite” and “video game,” respectively.
A list of 10 subtopics is listed below, with your current highlighted by a Material Theme indicator. “Overview” is the first and prominently places the Knowledge Panel card at the center instead of off to the right-hand side. Other UI remains the same, with the Search field up top and filters below.
This Google Search subtopic sidebar interface is not yet widely rolled and did not appear on any of our test searches.
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