I have become a strong advocate for Google’s collections, even believing that the automated curation of content by users on the web is the future of the Internet. We’ve covered how you can use them to inspire your 2021 goals, seen a custom collections icon appear on hardware remotes for Google TV, and even hoped that items in Chrome could be saved to them before the company decides to go. ‘go to the playlist. road. It’s been quite a journey, but one thing’s for sure – Google isn’t backing down and killing Collections.

Instead, it’s leaning into it more than ever, even though updates are rare, they always seem to make sense. Today, as 9to5Google discovered, the Collections tab of the Google Search app for Android has received a major overhaul. Instead of just showcasing your custom collections in a list with suggestions at the top, it now shows multiple segments highlighting the collections created by Google that are at the heart of many of its services.

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There is a new “Quick Access” section at the top that can be edited (although currently broken), and will likely show you the last two things you added, as evidenced by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that I just added to my Google TV watchlist earlier this morning. Below that is a “Shopping” section that displays the items you’ve chosen to “follow” in Google Shopping, and just below, a “Continue Searching” section that gives you suggestions based on recent Shopping search queries.

A new “Shows & Movies” segment displays the items you’ve recently added to your Google TV Watchlist, along with a link to jump straight to the full list. Fortunately, your handmade collections have their own section, although they can be found further down the page, and pressing the “View your collections” button will bring you to a tiled layout showing them all.

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Finally, a “Recipes” block near the bottom has all the delicious and fattening foods you’ve bookmarked on the web, as well as a “Go to Cookbook” button that shows you every item you’ve ever been able to call up. . on your Nest Hub. I really like the thoughtful layout of these elements, as it shows that Google is trying to bring automated collections to the fore and take the manual labor out of using them.

Overall, the Collections tab loads and navigates between pages much faster, and as 9to5 pointed out, it feels less like a web wrapper and more like a personalized experience. I am very happy to see that Google continues to develop this feature and make it more visible on the web. Recently, the Collections ‘bookmark’ icon on Google image search results went from the outside to the outside to be hidden behind the ‘more’ menu, which put me off a little, but this update renews my enthusiasm! As of this writing, the web interface hasn’t been updated to match the mobile experience, but we’ll see if that will come in time.