Google’s New Sidebar Menu in Search

It is no secret that Google is competing with Facebook’s news feed these days. Things took a major turn last month when Google introduced the ‘Google Feed’. The company keeps updating their arsenal by introducing newer features and weeding out some old ones from time to time. In a new update, a Google search sidebar menu has begun to show up for some users.

Google Search Sidebar Menu: Google’s Latest Introduction In War Against Facebook

The aforementioned menu can be brought forward by pressing the hamburger menu in the top left corner of the Google Search page.

Press the button circled to bring up the new sidebar

This Google search sidebar menu comprises of four options – Home, Saved, Settings and Help.

The options presented in the sidebar

‘Home’ brings you back to the Google home page for search regardless of whichever page you are on. ‘Help’ shows you the basic FAQs about what the menu is about. However, the juicier of the lot are the ‘Saved’ and ‘Settings’ features. Let us take a closer look.

Features of the Google Search Sidebar Menu

Tapping on ‘Saved’ on this newly introduced Google search sidebar menu shows you the content that you save while navigating Google Search & Maps. This is sort of a pinned collection of images that you like and want to quickly go through at one place. This is also the place where you can look at the places you have saved, etc. Simply put, this is quite similar to the ‘saved’ feature on Facebook.

Saved holds all the saved images & places

Finally, the settings option. Tapping on the settings of the Google search sidebar menu will bring you to the search settings. This gives you the basic options to tweak your search results such as turning safe search on or off, enabling or disabling recent locations, etc. You can also tweak the language of the search results, as well as the language used by the Google products you use there.

All said and done, this is quite a handy feature from Google. The purpose of this Google search sidebar menu is to give users easy access to saved content and to give Google a familiar option that Facebook users are actively using since months. The sidebar menu is currently being tested with a few users and is likely to get a bigger rollout in the days to follow. Stay tuned with us for more updates!