Google is quietly testing trending topics section for mobile search
It appears Google is quietly testing a new feature on mobile that shows trending search topics from within the search bar.
Similar to Facebook and Twitter’s trending topics section, I recently spotted popular searches populating on Google in my Safari browser on iOS.
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After typing a letter into Google search, a drop down menu appears with a list of trending searches. In the photo above, you can see what people were recently looking for over the weekend, from which channel the MTV Movie Awards were on -- oh, irony; clearly, it was clearly on MTV! -- to news about Anderson Cooper’s mother. Selecting one of the topics will bring you to a collection of news articles about the topic.
Google may be testing the feature among a few set of users.
While the feature was working up until this morning, it recently disappeared from my search bar after I cleared my search history for some screenshots I wanted to take for this story.
Google has not yet responded to a request for comment, but with no real mentions of the feature on social media sites, it’s possible Google is testing it among a small pool of users.
Google’s move into this territory doesn't come as a complete surprise. As platforms like Facebook and Twitter roll out new ways to entice its users to stay engaged, Google likely wants to highlight perhaps what it knows best -- what people are searching for and providing relevant information -- and encourage users to stick around longer.
BONUS: How to unlock your iPhone's secret emoticon keyboard
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Samantha Murphy Kelly was the Deputy Tech Editor for Mashable, where she covered lifestyle tech and entertainment. She joined the Mashable team in 2011 and was based in New York.Samantha is regularly featured on national TV broadcasts -- including Fox, Fox Business, CNBC, the BBC and HuffPost Live -- contributes to radio segments (NPR, Wall Street Journal Radio) and has served as a panelist and moderator at conferences.Before joining Mashable, Samantha covered the tech industry as a senior writer for TechNewsDaily and wrote stories for sister publications LiveScience.com and Laptop Magazine. Her stories have been syndicated to various sites including CNN, Yahoo! News, MSNBC, ABC News, Fox News and CBS News. She also spent five years at a retail trade magazine writing about social media and technology, worked at ABC News in the Brian Ross investigative unit and got her start in journalism at CourtTV.com, where she reported on high-profile court cases. She’s a graduate of New York University with a degree in journalism.Samantha has taught English in Thailand, climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan and has a thing for pizza.
