Google Announces New Web Filter for Google Search: Text-Only Content Display

Today, Google introduced a new feature for its search engine: a filter option named "Web." This feature is designed to allow users to exclude images, videos, rich media modules, and other visual elements from their search results, offering a return to the simplicity of text-only content.

Initially, search engine results pages displayed only the titles, summaries, and links of websites related to the queried keywords, presented in plain text with keywords highlighted in bold, offering a clean and straightforward interface. However, over time, to enhance user interactivity and click-through rates, search engines began incorporating rich media content, such as website thumbnail images, movie and book cards, YouTube videos, etc.

Despite these changes aiming to improve user experience, the information overload became too complicated for some users. Google's introduction of this new filter feature addresses this issue. By selecting the "Web" filter on the search results page, users can automatically exclude all non-text content, displaying only text information.

However, this solution is not perfect yet. Currently, users cannot set this filter as a default option. Each time they search, users need to manually activate this filter by clicking "More/Web" beneath the search results, potentially requiring repetition of this action with every search.

This feature is rolling out to users worldwide starting today, but as it has just been launched, it will take some time to assess its actual effectiveness. Users are expected to be able to test and evaluate the performance of this new filter starting tomorrow.

Additionally, this feature supports usage on Google Search's mobile web version, but it remains unclear whether the Google Search app will also support this feature.