As Google celebrates its 20th anniversary, it announced a range of new updates to its namesake search engine. The Mountain View company announced it was drawing on its artificial intelligence capabilities to provide smart videos in Google search with a new "Featured Videos" card. It will start to play videos in results, one after another -- but only show the short parts of videos that are relevant to your search. Google, the parent company of which is Alphabet, also introduced an activity card which would show pages a user has visited, at the top of search results. Users will have the ability to delete items from this activity card. The company also introduced "Collections," through which it will let users save content from the activity card to their collections. Google will then use things you've saved, and your history, in order to recommend new content for your collections. CNBC adds: Additionally Google is enhancing topics for certain things you search for. If you search for "pug," for example, you'll see a card where you can find little things to tap, like names, training details and how to buy or adopt a pug. Google will make sure that these cards at the top of search results will stay fresh based on what people publish online, Google vice president of product management Nick Fox said.

Google is also redesigning its feed for recommended content, which appears in places like the Google app or the homescreen of Google's Pixel devices. It will now be called "Discover," and it will show videos, among other things, for the first time. [...] Google is bringing the Discover feed to the Google homepage on all mobile browsers in the next few weeks Moxley said. The Discover feed will remember preferences for the language you like different types of content to be in. For example, if you like recipes in Spanish, it will only show pages with Spanish-language recipes, but if you like your news in English, news articles will be in English.

Google's image search is getting enhancements. There will be tags that show products, and other kinds of images, like stock images and do-it-yourself tutorials, so you'll be able find the sort of thing you're looking for faster. Google Images will get its new look on desktop computers starting this Thursday.

Microsoft has a new 'North Star' for search: One, unified, smart search box that will span Windows, Office, Bing and more. From a report: For the past several years, Microsoft been working to unify and personalize its search experience across Office 365. But now the company is going a step further and bringing Windows 10 the same search experience. At Ignite last year, Microsoft said its holy grail for search was to enable people to search from wherever they were without interrupting their workflow. Bing for Business -- a way to turn Bing into an Intranet search service -- also debuted last year. At this year's Ignite, Microsoft is refining and expanding that search mission. Microsoft's plan is to put the search box "in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows and Office apps, so that search is always one click away." The company also is "supercharging" the search box so that users can more easily find people, related content, commands for apps and more before they actually start typing in the search box, as it will be contextually aware and offer proactive search results and suggestions. Today, September 24, Microsoft is starting to roll out a preview of this Microsoft Search feature to Office.com, Bing.com (where it's no longer called Bing for Business, but, instead Microsoft Search in Bing) and the SharePoint Mobile app. Microsoft Search will be coming to Edge, Windows and other versions of Office in the coming months, going into 2019.