In an era when information is so readily available at our fingertips, telling someone asking mundane questions to “just Google it” comes standard. Google seems to have caught on to this. In the latest update for the Google App on Android, users can utilize a Google search share button that makes it easy to send search results to another person.
The concept isn’t a completely new one. The ultimate passive-aggressive service “Let Me Google That For You” put extra sass in the hands of people who were done with their friends and family wondering aloud instead of using the internet. The service allows people to Google something, then send a link to others which will search for the same results right in front of them. It’s funny and gets the point across.
The Google search share button isn’t quite at the level of passive-aggressive as LMGTFY. It will create a custom link for you to send to the people bothering you with questions and show them the search results. That said, it’s also not yet a perfect science. Individual search results depend on the user. While one person might send a friend their search results for any given query, the friend it was shared to may see different results and texts. This is down to Google personalizing results based on what it knows about the searcher.
Google had never made sharing a search result this easy until now. Users could always copy/paste their very long search results link, but this addition to the app creates a more manageable link. According to 9t05 Google, different devices handle the link in different ways:
“Androids are brought directly into the Google app (via Google Play Services), PCs are sent to the traditional Google Search results page, and Chromebooks seem to pass the link to Google Play Services then back to the browser to the Google Search results.”
There is no word on when the Google search share button will be out of beta testing or coming to other Google-supporting platforms.
