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Here's how to get rid of those 'suggestions' on Chrome's new tab page
Rolling out to some people on stable Chrome for desktop right now
Chrome for Android and iOS has been showing you article suggestions as part of its Discover feed on the new tab page for ages, and now, desktop Chrome is in for a similar treatment. As discovered by 9to5Google, Google has started rolling out various kinds of cards that help you continue browsing for recipes and products. Luckily, you can easily deactivate these cards if you don't see value in them.
Chrome's crowded grid tab switcher gets trending search suggestion chips
Another way for Google to suck you into its Search product
Late last year, Chrome began testing a very busy tab switcher interface with a grid layout, incognito toggle, Google search bar, and site shortcuts. A few reiterations later, we're now looking at a slightly newer approach which keeps everything nearly the same, but puts trending search terms at the forefront instead of site shortcuts.
Google is currently testing an expansion of its existing Play Store filters to help find better-rated apps. First spotted by 9to5Google, the change brings a handful of new filtering options that will appear when searching, including a pair of star rating limits and an Editors' Choice-only flag that can help separate the app wheat from the chaff.
The Settings menu/app on Android phones has evolved quite a bit in recent years. Starting in Android 8.1 it got a search bar that made digging for individual settings a bit easier, and in Android N it got suggestions to help encourage you to enable things like a lock screen, finish the setup process, or explore additional customization options. Google even reserved some secret sauce for search and suggestions on its Pixels, and now it's breaking that out into its own app called Search Suggestions.
A couple of months ago, we heard that Google was working on an updated UI for Chrome's omnibox. Colorful images and brief descriptions were being tested when you searched something in the Chrome URL bar, and this was a welcome change from the sea of white and gray that would normally be seen. Further improvements are also on the way, with favicons being introduced next to bookmarked pages.
Developers are freshly back from a long holiday break and the first of Google's updates are starting to trickle out of Mountain View. The first to make an appearance is a new beta release of the Google app itself. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't appear to be a particularly feature-laden build, at least not from a user's point of view. However, there are a couple of topics to discuss through the lens <cough> of a teardown.
Some users have been seeing these green suggestions when performing a search on the Play Store app for almost a year, but the feature began rolling out more widely in June (I still don't have it). However, it only seemed to provide keywords to further specify your search, not proper filters to separate the results according to price. Now it looks like Google is testing the latter kind.
What's another week without another Google app server-side test that few will see and even fewer will like? In today's edition, we have a new search suggestions look in the Google app and search widget: blue words inside a rounded rectangle (TIL the shape is called a stadium) at the bottom of the search suggestions overlay.