We all thought Google+ was dead; Google+ is not, it turns out, dead. The search firm’s on-again-off-again obsession with building a successful social network is on, again.

Just a few months ago, Google announced that it was stripping features from Google+ in an effort to offer “a more focused” experience, a move many saw as the first step towards an eventual shutdown of the site. For the first time since it was launched, users were freed from the requirement to have a Plus account to use popular features of Google such as sharing content, chatting with contacts, or creating a YouTube channel.

Now, the company’s taking a different tack. A blogpost from Google’s Director of Streams Eddie Kessler, headlined “introducing the new Google+”, detailed a redesign of the service aimed at improving the experience for people who actually use it.

Key to the new design are two aspects of Google+ that are popular among those people: communities, which let the site’s users group together around shared interests, and collections, which allows individual users to group their posts together by topic. Those features are “front and centre” in the new design.

The result is that Google+ is less of the confused Facebook clone it launched as, and a more focused experience based around sharing and connecting over specific interests – “everything from Zombie Cats to Vintage Calculators”, Kessler says.

Instead, it’s similar to sites such as Reddit and Pinterest, giving the company a chance of encouraging more dedicated users by becoming the go-to location for conversation around a particular interest.

That focus is also useful for another reason: advertising. It’s significantly easier to sell adverts against users already greatly segmented according to interests, although Google doesn’t yet allow advertisers to take signals from membership in Plus communities.