Search giant Google’s popular Hangouts Meet will now be simply known as Google Meet. The new development came to light in a blog post by two of Google’s directors of product management, Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Smita Hashim.

The post does not mention the change, but refers to Hangouts Meet as Google Meet.

Google Meet

According to an Android Police report, the company has updated a number of support pages with new titles.

The Verge has also reported that Google confirmed to it in a mail about the name change.

The development comes at a time when the use of Google Meet has increased as the Coronavirus pandemic has forced people to work from home. All meetings and conferences have now gone online.

According to the company, the usage of the Google Meet is currently 25 times what it was in January.

Google Meet security.

The blogpost also highlights security features of Google Meet. It says that the service employs an array of counter-abuse protections to keep meetings safe, including anti-hijacking measures for both web meetings and dial-ins.

Google Meet prevents malicious attempts to guess the meeting ID and any unauthorised attempt to join it.

As part of its security feature, Google has limited the ability of external participants to join a meeting more than 15 minutes in advance. “External participants cannot join meetings unless they’re on the calendar invite or have been invited by in-domain participants,” the blogpost added.