Eight months after rolling out a personalized news feed for its mobile app, Google Inc. today introduced a dramatically improved update that aims to change how consumers explore the web.

The upgrade brings a host of enhancements focused mainly on better aligning content with user preferences. According to Google, the feed can display videos, articles, movie reviews and practically any other update that its algorithms reckon will fall into the reader’s area of interest. Each item is shown in a separate card for easy viewing. 

Shashi Thakur, the search giant’s vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post that its algorithms fine-tune the selection by analyzing trending topics and activity data from each account. The feed should consequently adapt as a user’s browsing habits evolve over time. If they start regularly watching a certain YouTube channel, they can expect new videos from the account to show up not long after.

However, Google is not leaving the curation entirely up to its algorithms. The company has also included several customization features for manually tweaking the feed. Users can subscribe to updates about a topic that piques their interest and filter unexciting stories through an menu accessible via three dots at the top of each card. 

Coupled with the automatic personalization performed behind the scene, these features may just enable Google to draw some traffic away from Facebook Inc.’s iconic news feed. Any extra hits that the search giant gains can in turn translate into new revenue. The new feed doesn’t yet support advertising, but there’s a good chance that this will change given how well the card-based interface could lend itself to showing promotions.

The manual filtering options represent another major plus. Google could lure marketers with the promise of higher returns by preventing ads from showing up for people who have removed related content in their feeds. A user who chooses to filter trending music videos, for instance, wouldn’t have to be bothered with concert promotions.

Regardless of its monetization plans, the search giant clearly intends to realize the feed’s full potential. Multiple reports claim that the search eventually plans to extend its availability beyond Android and iOS to the web in a bid to target desktop users.

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