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Google is toying with search suggestions in the Play Store [Updated]

Google plays with its apps’ UIs continuously, which is why new and unexpected things pop up almost on a daily basis. This time the focus is on search suggestions, which the company is tweaking in both the Play Store and in its image search engine…

The first — and seemingly only — one to spot the change so far has been an Android Police reader, who took the screenshots in the image above. As we can see, upon searching for an app in the Play Store, the new UI prompted the user with a series of rectangles containing potential additional information to better narrow down the query.

They make sense, are relatively easy on the eye, and retain the new green color that the Play Store has recently adopted, which make them an overall welcome addition we hope to see pushed to everyone soon (as you may have reckoned, this is indeed a server-side switch operation).

Here’s what it looks like:

To match the Play Store, the image section of Google Search also got a similar facelift, with tags that apparently take you to an entirely new — albeit, of course, related search. Extended text search, on the other hand, seems to still be there, although it’s unclear what kind of search triggers one type of suggestion to surface over others.

Update: It appears that the rectangular prompts in Image Search have been live for some time now, unlike the ones in the Play Store. The original report mentions those as part of the update because they are seemingly activated in the US alone, and I (based in the UK) was not able to reproduce them with identical searches within neither the Chrome browser nor the Google app itself.

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Avatar for Edoardo Maggio Edoardo Maggio

Italian. Tech geek, video games, photography and music lover, comics-based movies enthusiast, and a sucker for good design. Amateur photographer (VSCO, 500px), writer and reporter for 9to5Google.


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