14 ms·

Redesigning Google News

198 points by sndean 9y ago

fmfernandez 9y ago
Horrible!!!! I have been using this product for years, suddenly they make this change without the option to rollback. I can't search, I can't filter. If these options are there I can't find them. These usability experts... how can they fail so miserably at times.
uberuberuber 9y ago
A giant leap backwards in information density. The "in the news" section is just trending hashtag fluff. "Easier Navigation" == More clicks to access the same content. And best of all... no option in settings to opt out.
- puzzle 9y ago
  What Project Kennedy tried to do and wasn't allowed to once the pitchforks came out, Material Design has successfully accomplished. I spent ten minutes trying to find the setting for a compact layout (like the Kennedy versions of Gmail and News eventually supported). Ugh.
  - justinjlynn 9y ago
    I really do dislike it when tools start "simplifying" at the expense of their most invested users. While that cohort isn't always the most vocal, they're generally the most stable userbase. It really doesn't feel like that additional risk of abandonment is accounted for in the multi-armed bandit testing.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      To be fair, there's something that is actually more advanced. In the settings, you can now block sources you don't ever want to see, by entering names. Before, you had to play the lottery of "wait until this stupid source with auto-generated news items based on stock tickers and press releases shows up in the right bar". That's the only place where you had the option to block them. You couldn't do it in the main section in the middle, which is where they tended to appear most often. I just added a bunch. Now, if I could follow Entertainment news about rock bands, without getting junk about the Kardashians and WWE...
    - seanlinehan 9y ago
      It practice it tends to be the exact opposite. Your most invested users tend to be the most vocal and least likely to represent the majority of your user base. The additional risk of abandonment of the entrenched super-users is usually 1. accepted in favor of appealing to a new, larger group of people 2. usually far less than those users will tell you. The Flexport blog has a great post on this: https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrage-50f42f2dc8a4 https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrag...
- eyelidlessness 9y ago
  I'm getting older and I have poor eyesight. The information density of the old design was a huge distraction for me, making it very difficult to actually read the news. Whitespace can be incredibly helpful for readability.
  - magoghm 9y ago
    I agree that whitespace is helpful for readability, but the amount of whitespace they're using is overkill.
philipkglass 9y ago
I dearly hope that they restore advanced search options and access to all search-matches. It's currently a nightmarish Playskool version of yesterday's Google News, suitable for ages 6-12. I like to search for specific topics in time buckets, e.g. "wind power" in the past day or "spectroscopy" in the past week. Maybe even search between specific user-specified dates if I'm diving into the history of a complex topic. Now I can't specify the time range and can't see all matching results even for the search terms I turn into a dedicated section. It's as limited and frustrating as Google News on Android. They've also hidden the snippet text that let me quickly judge whether or not I wanted to click through to a full article. Presumably that's to protect themselves against European copyright disputes, but it's a big step backward for users. I'm trying Bing News for the first time today. It still has snippets and time ranges, but also lets me see only a small fraction of the stories that match my search criteria. Yahoo News apparently doesn't permit time based searches at all. What other products best fill this Google News-shaped void for news power-searchers? EDIT: for now I can get the old, powerful Google News by initiating a regular Google search and then clicking over to the News tab. But I wouldn't count on this escape hatch remaining much longer :-(
- niutech 9y ago
  If you don't like it, you can get back to the classic version of Google News by installing the User-Agent Switcher for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switche...) and switching the user agent string on Google News to Windows Phone 8.
  - fosco 9y ago
    confirmed, this works. Thank you. guess this is a reason to learn python and try scraping google news and headlines to look more like a hackernews page with article descriptions. my python-fu is low so if anyone thinks this is 'easy' or already done please let me know.
augustocallejas 9y ago
This redesign has the look and feel of the Facebook feed plus Trending section on the upper-right hand side. With so many people consuming news from Facebook[1], this is not surprising at all. Maybe Google News is where the Google Plus feed will ultimately show up. [1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-s-adults-get-news-on-facebook/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...
rocky1138 9y ago
Does anyone anywhere think this is good? Why? Material design, in my opinion, is a disaster. Especially for desktop, where screens are huge and existing UI feedback loops are in place and well known.
- RachelF 9y ago
  Looks like Google news has employed the Windows 10 UI designers from Microsoft.
  - NDT 9y ago
    RachelFGuitar?
- bluthru 9y ago
  A grey background was dingy when Material Design was introduced and it's still dingy today. The previous News design was much cleaner. With some tweaking it would be much preferred to all of the superfluous cards.
- Raphael 9y ago
  I'll take the redesign on mobile gladly. The horizontal cards from the last redesign were a travesty.
z6 9y ago
At first glance I'm not a fan, but I'll give it some time. So much white space. I wish they give us a compact option.
seanf 9y ago
I left feedback that the sidebars should be collapsable. I also miss seeing the lede under each headline. Even the "Full Coverage" view is missing a preview of article content. Perhaps an issue with fair use? Regular users will not need that left sidebar to be reminded of what sections they have configured for the page, and it takes up a large amount of screen space. The right sidebar might be useful to more people, but the "In the News" block is just words and phrases pulled from the main content. It seems redundant. Overall I like the fresh look. Google News is one of the few sites I have been visiting almost every day for well over a decade now!
- eatbitseveryday 9y ago
  > the sidebars should be collapsable > Regular users will not need that left sidebar It is collapsable, but I could not determine from your writing if you figured it out; click the Main Menu icon in the top left. I agree, there is often more whitespace added with new "revisions" to Google services - Gmail, G+, News, Hangouts, etc.
  - seanf 9y ago
    Thanks! No, I did not notice that hamburger menu +50px away :)
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  Yes! Sort of a Craigslist meets old-style Fark for news. This is exactly the way a news site should look.
r1b 9y ago
I am working on https://news.r1b.solutions https://news.r1b.solutions out of frustration with Google News. Goals include: * Wire services only * Fast, minimal interface * Global perspective I am currently focused on adding wire services from non-western countries.
- RubyPinch 9y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, how are you getting the data? just site scraping each source?
  - r1b 9y ago
    It comes from Twitter! It is v expensive to directly subscribe to each wire service - also difficult to maintain scrapers for each. Many services already post links to Twitter - for the ones that don't it is easy to create an account driven by a scraper & maintain the common interface. You can check out the code here: https://github.com/r1b/news-wires https://github.com/r1b/news-wires
- ilamont 9y ago
  I would like this, if only to eliminate the fluff and click bait that dominates unfiltered Google News. For the service you are developing, is there a way to control the topics shown, or eliminate certain subjects or keywords from the display? One comment about using wire services from other countries: Many of them are government-sponsored or otherwise controlled by the government/ruling political parties, and therefore can be quite biased in their presentation of local or regional news. Xinhua, Taiwan's Central News Agency, and Voice of America are examples.
  - r1b 9y ago
    Thank you for your thoughtful comment. Filters are on the ROADMAP.md - I am interested in allowing users to create different "views" of the firehose (e.g via presence / absence of keywords) that function in a similar way to Google Alerts. I am aware of the bias that exists in many wire services & I appreciate the reminder. Some would say that there is a significant (western) bias in the services already that I have made available! I am still struggling to find a way to present a global perspective while still making people aware of these prejudices. One of my favorite wire services I have encountered is the Non-Aligned Movement News Network (http://namnewsnetwork.org/v3/index.php http://namnewsnetwork.org/v3/index.php), which was established to publish news that is not controlled by the interests of major world powers.
ekianjo 9y ago
> https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/06.19.17_before-after_katrinat.width-1000.png https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... It's not designed for readability, it's designed for less density of information. It's easy to do that by putting space everywhere, but the real challenge is keeping the same kind of information density while making it more readable. Really disappointed by their redesign.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  The result could be summarised as: We made it look more (exactly) like Facebook. Which has proven to be wildly popular.
- UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
  I'm just glad the new design works better on a touch screen. Had to massively zoom the page before to click two links individually.
- makecheck 9y ago
  The lack of density is why I am constantly using "request desktop site" for things like Reddit, too. Sometimes we don't need a "design" so much as a list of links.
- isomorphic 9y ago
  If you view the new Google "News" from a desktop browser with a narrow width (well, narrow for these days--1024 pixels, so I can actually have other windows on my screen), the "content" takes up about a third of the page. The other two thirds is wasted. Even within the "content," tremendous amounts of space is wasted, and less information is present than before.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    - Everyone runs their browsers maximised don't-cha-know... I really don't, yet I've been noticing over the past few years my browser window width has been steadily getting wider to accommodate modern website design.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
xname2 9y ago
Even from their example, you can see the political bias clearly in the first pic. I believe that they believe themselves have an unbiased algorithm which creates this result, which they believe is unbiased. However, it is clear to me, their result is definitely biased. I do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a top list of covering on the supreme court decision on the travel ban only includes reports from NYT, WP, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune (the only right), CNN. I also do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a list of other top stories from only Politico, NPR, WP. So In a list of nine titles, only one right media (Chicago Tribune) got a shot, but not Fox News or WSJ. Not even CBS, ABC which are kind of centrist. Of course, an argument would be that most of the media is left. But don't forget, the left / right split among the American voters is not that extreme. If you generate a list of new reports, which one is more unbiased: A) represent the perspective of journalists (90% left), B) represent the perspective of voters (60% left)? My experience with Google News is that, if you do not manually customize new feed, you will get mostly from NYT and WP, almost never FN or WSJ. You will also get a lot far / crazy left stuff from Huffington post, Daily Beast, Mother Jones, but you will never get national review, not to mention breitbart.
- tacomonstrous 9y ago
  Fox News is hardly news these days. Today their front page headline was about the Obamas being on vacation. This, on a day when the Senate Republicans fell flat on their face on healthcare. Wonder why that only got a small mention way at the bottom. Even now the main headline is about Palin suing the NYT. Your basic problem is viewing this as a left/right divide, when it's really a reasonable journalism/explicitly partisan reporting divide. Conservatives have been trained by decades of talk radio to think this way, and now all they have left on their side is a bunch of charlatans. CNN or MSNBC aren't paragons of virtue, but at least they are not completely disingenuous hucksters like the ones Fox trots out all the time. Hell, MSNBC even features their own right-wing charlatan in Hugh Hewitt.
  - xname2 9y ago
    Your premise is that Google News only include news, which is totally wrong. Google News includes lots of comments. For example, Huffington post appears a lot in Google News.
oblib 9y ago
Personally, I think using "Snopes" as a fact checking source gives it much more credibility than it deserves. And the whole idea of publishing "Fact Checks" like this sounds and feels Orwellian. I don't mean to say that I don't trust those media fact checkers who dig into claims made by competing media sources, but I don't trust them 100% and I've seen blatant spin in too many "Fact Check" claims to not have to fact check them too. Hell, I don't even trust Google search results anymore.
- smt88 9y ago
  Examples of Snopes or other reputable fact checkers being wrong or biased?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bpodgursky 9y ago
    They rarely lie about straight facts, but the WashPo checker obviously slants their "half lie", "pants on fire" "mostly true" measures as politically convenient. Most people are too lazy to read the full details.
    - smt88 9y ago
      Example(s)? I read the full details. There were several situations in which I thought they were being too diplomatic regarding the Clinton email scandal (meaning they were being unnecessarily harsh on Clinton).
  - oblib 9y ago
    I think this is pretty bias: http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-herbicide-in-food/ http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...
    - smt88 9y ago
      How so? They explain their reasoning, and it's independently verifiable. I was especially impressed by the note at the bottom: > "NOTE: This story has been updated based on discussions with a number of scientists in the field. It was originally listed as a MIXTURE, but we have now reclassified it as FALSE in response to concerns that our original narrative might have led viewers into taking the results of an activist group’s lab analyses as a scientifically rigorous addition to the debate."
iamthepieman 9y ago
anything branded google for content consumption I avoid or mitigate with other sources. I use gmail because I almost entirely control that (unsubscribe, spam filters, user filters and auto forwarding) Unless they are actively deleting email sent to me and changing the content of email I am getting exactly what I want to get in my inbox I use Google search in conjunction with duck duck go, bing, content aggregators, offline sources and for things i don't care about the source or that doesn't really have a possibility of bias (weather forecast, traffic) or when i know that the google search is really just a quick way to search something else (stack overflow, wikipedia) the google new tab interface on mobile has such abominable suggestions that I quit using chrome on mobile (helps that I don't have a phone, just a tablet for e-reading, music and causal games) Maybe it would have better suggestions if I turned on google tracking (app and website) or if I turned off the VPN and anonymizing proxy on my router - yeah right.
jMyles 9y ago
First reaction: OK, what do we use instead of Google News now?
- watter 9y ago
  It isn't the answer you're looking for but it is all that comes to mind: Drudge.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  An RSS reader that fetches articles from a few news sources that you like.
  - lukateake 9y ago
    I've missed Google Reader for a long, long time.
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      As a non-Google Reader user, what did it offer that Feedly doesn't on the free tier?
      - lukateake 9y ago
        Stats, sir. Stats. Plus, some killer search functionality obviously.
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      There are many alternatives now, Feedbin and Feedly to name a couple.
    - lloeki 9y ago
      Digg Reader fits the bill
    - Theizestooke 9y ago
      Get Tiny Tiny RSS. It's a blessing. https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home
glorithm 9y ago
And yet this is not sync with Play Newsstand. Is product management a thing at Google these days? Or they like many concurrent experiments by different teams don't talk to each other?
colordrops 9y ago
A new design can't hide the fact that news aggregated through google seems to have a strong ideological bent. I've spent a lot of time setting up the weighting of various news sites and still can't seem to get certain agendas filtered out of the news. Perhaps this is a problem with news in general and only reflected through Google News, but I don't think so - things have gotten worse over time and certain sites seem to be over-represented.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I've been concerned about my need intake being too biased and started using a app called "read across the aisle". It has news sources categorized by political position and tracks how balanced your news diet is. Maybe that can help you not being negatively impacted by certain agendas since you are more likely to get a balanced view?
  - panic 9y ago
    The concept of "sides" and where the lines are drawn between them are part of the agenda: you're not escaping it. If every morning you're reading Fox News and The Huffington Post, you're getting "both sides" but not much insight.
- blackguardx 9y ago
  Which sites are over represented for you? I think google uses people's browsing habits to show them "personalized" news. Google seems to have miscategorized me. It exposed me to some crazy fringe news outlets (Breitbart) at first, but now it is just annoying.
bpodgursky 9y ago
Ugh. This means the two-column view is disappearing (it was an option in labs). Infuriating that phone-driven design is destroying the desktop experience.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Thats been the trend for years now with the "mobile first" principle advocated by bootstrap and many others. Very sad trend overall.
  - cratermoon 9y ago
    It's based on trends, though. Look at the traffic stats for any major website and mobile is outpacing desktop everywhere.
    - bpodgursky 9y ago
      Yeah and I get that you'd do mobile first as a startup, but Google news probably has > 100mm daily views, you'd think they could afford the extra .5 engineers it takes to maintain the old UI.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      Yes but Id rather have a choice instead of being force fed a mobile UI on my desktop monitor.
    - twhb 9y ago
      I see that quoted a lot, and never really dug into. - What about purchases? I'd bet that the vast majority of online - not in-app - purchases happen on desktop. - Are these companies devoting extra resources to their mobile websites and to marketing them?
    - beezle 9y ago
      I thought the whole idea with html5 and responsive this and that was the ability to very easily serve one layout for mobile and another for traditional desktop. This redesign is god awful for desktop use. The Bing alternative is only marginally better. I honestly have no idea who they test these on before release to think they are a) good and b) an improvement.
dreamcompiler 9y ago
I had already pretty much stopped using GN because it was so overburdened with Javascript that pages refused to scroll. (And that was on Android, which you'd think Google would optimize for.) Now it seems to scroll well enough, but you have to scroll a lot more because the information density is so low. Yet another website designed to impress rather than inform. Not interested.
dayaz36 9y ago
It seems like they've also changed the algorithm. I'm getting completely irrelevant articles to what I search for. For example if you search for "Chobani" the top articles are about Yoplait(??)...then there is a bunch of results about Alex Jones interview with Megyn Kelly(???)...I know there was a whole debacle between Alex Jones and Chobani but these articles are not even about that. They're about Alex Jone's interview with Megyn Kelly. Maybe they'll have a sentence or two in the article about the incident with Chobani but these articles have nothing to do with Chobani! I'm just using one example, it's like this for everything I search for. https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/chobani/chobani?hl=en&ned=us https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/chobani/choban...
- gnufied 9y ago
  Yep yep - they either changed the Algorithm or did something stupid with the UI. For example, searching for "H4 EAD" on news.google.com returns nothing now - new - https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/h4%20ead/h4%20ead?hl=en&ned=us https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/h4%20ead/h4%20... VS Old - https://tinyurl.com/y9tf8cou https://tinyurl.com/y9tf8cou Very weird.
  - Jordrok 9y ago
    Oh wow, now that is really bad. I would assume that would have to be a bug, but it seems like a pretty massive thing to overlook.
fragmede 9y ago
And yet, ditching Google's much-maligned AMP project is not discussed at all. If this were a wholistic attempt at a redesign by an no outside party, AMP and its detractors reasons would at least merit a mention.
mythrwy 9y ago
I suppose this is an anti-example of using your "market dominance in one area to gain unfair competitive advantage"?
dgudkov 9y ago
Google Now suggests interesting news on my Android phone. After a bit of training it I now find 40-50% of suggested articles worth reading (which is a rather high ratio). Google News had a different selection algorithm that is not so "trainable" and therefore less efficient (despite being linked to the same account). It would be great if besides the new UI for the News they also started using the selection algorithm from Google Now.
visarga 9y ago
It's more readable but I hate the horizontal menu bar. I use a MacBook Pro and the screen is already short and wide. Taking valuable vertical space is bad, when there is so much more horizontal space. Another: why cut titles at 10 words short? There is so much empty space around, but I can't read the last 2 words of the title without opening the article. What I love the most: having the entities extracted from text and entity-centric news navigation.
cm2187 9y ago
I hope scrolling on an ipad now works (not a small feature for a website, but html is fun to break). I wonder if they also fixed the picture problem. They seemed to collect a random picture on the website of the article and associate it with the story on the front page of google news. This leads to terrible associations, like you would have a headline about the Queen of England illustrated with a mugshot of a thug, or an article about some rapist being arrested illustrated by a movie star that happened to promote a movie the same day.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Actually for scrolling on the ipad I can confirm they didn't fix it. It is stilly very jerky.
- Tempest1981 9y ago
  iPad scrolling is really jerky, and no tap to return to the top. Sometimes it flickers between 2 scroll positions, vibrating at 60 fps. Hope it's not deliberate. How is it on Android?
exodust 9y ago
The problem that has plagued Google News at least here in Australia for some time is the regular inclusion of headlines that redirect to paywalls. These links need to be flagged as paywall only, otherwise it's no different to the kind of behaviour Google claims to be against - links not accurately representing their destination. It's about link integrity. Nobody wants to play "roll the dice" every time they click a news article, with some asking for a credit card, others not. No doubt the paywall services pay Google to include those links, but Google should be honest and correctly label paywall links on the Google News page, or stop including those news outlets that use these redirect tactics. Apart from that, the redesign seems to be re-inventing link hover style. Mouse over a section and every link in that section turns blue, not just the link you're hovering over. I'd prefer if the main headlines stood out more for easier scanning, keep them always blue for example, and the other text black. Or just keep links blue and non-links black. Right now it all seems to blend in, without enough visual separation. I'll be visiting less, and might jump over to Feedly or similar.
- porjo 9y ago
  As a fellow Australian, I used to browse to news.google.com.au and see predominantly Australian news. Now, I get redirected to news.google.com and see no Australian content! (no, I'm not signed into Google) I really hope that gets fixed. EDIT: this URL gets me Australian news: https://news.google.com/news/headlines?ned=au&hl=en-AU https://news.google.com/news/headlines?ned=au&hl=en-AU
jacquesm 9y ago
The biggest improvement they could make to Google news is to do better selection of sources. With some regularity I get 'breitbartnews' as one of the things that I should supposedly be interested in.
strooper 9y ago
Google News has been the first page of any news media for me for last several years. I have relied on the the summery of the news under the headlines to consider whether to go to the news details or skip to the next news. And this latest redesign removes that summery. I can't think of any reason to using it as the first source of news any longer, unless Google decides to revert to last design.
richardw 9y ago
Cards, cards everywhere. Not using the full width of large screens. Not a fan yet, but maybe I'll warm to it. Or it'll be like when they changed the effect of "+" in search and I'll hate it but it'll work perfectly for Grandma (since I assume they've tested this a lot). We are after all a set of people who like the HN amount of news density. News is such an alluring area for change. It kinda sucks. I see the same stories for many days on Google News, can't mark it as "read"/"hide"/"don't care about this topic". Would prefer that over a new look.
amelius 9y ago
It doesn't have a "comments" section? That's a missed opportunity, imho.
thewhitetulip 9y ago
I am a regular user of google news and the color combination hurts my eyes and the main reason why I used google news till now was that I would read the gist. now, the hover function hurts my eyes too blue color (perhaps the people at Google have very high end monitors) and there is no two-three lines, just the title. Sigh. Google news is now successfully destroyed like Quora was few years ago.
corford 9y ago
I can't believe they've got rid of the text snippets below the headline (why??) but I like the dedicated fact check box!
luord 9y ago
I stopped using Google news because too often the same news piece appeared several times in the RSS feed. If these features address that, particularly labels, maybe I can get back to getting news from there, but the comments here aren't encouraging. I'll check it out myself anyway.
fosco 9y ago
Here is a redesign that does not increase efficiency, my opinion of course. Now more of my page has less information and in my opinion my goal is to consume more information in less space. this is terrible. http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/ http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/
xemdetia 9y ago
Can Google stop making these backwards layout changes? The old version is key logical headlines and related articles from multiple sources which was actually pretty nice as an aggregator. Now there is only one related article instead of 3. The plaintext version of the page because of the horizontal bar is now even harder to use. It feels like I need to make a site just to undo google changes and just give me a list of links again.
kogepathic 9y ago
Good lord this redesign is terribad. I can't even limit news stories to a time period as I can regular Google search results. I guess it will make Google News appeal more to Joe Everyman, but holy cow it is a blow to being able to find news stories for a specific period of time (e.g. only show me stories on "am4 itx" within the last week, so I don't read blogs reposting news about a "new" motherboard 3 months after it was announced) And yet Google continues to ignore Google Finance, which is by far the least updated Google operated site I've seen in ages. I mean, you still have to install Adobe Flash to get interactive charts, and the basic charts are simply an image. Seriously now?! Every other finance site has had fully HTML5 interactive charts since years.
bra-ket 9y ago
this is terrible, they really ruined a good product
visarga 9y ago
It would be amazing to have this kind of service operate over reddit, HN, Twitter, other forums and blog comments and tag them with 1000s of categories. I want to select only specific posts from all these sources. What Google has now is a collection of mainstream press classified in just a few subjects, almost the opposite of what I want.
malloci 9y ago
I have mixed feelings about the ability to block certain sources. On the one hand it's nice to be able to block random blogs or poorly written sources (in the grammatical sense) that somehow make their way into the google news docket. On the other hand, I worry that this will only increase the polarization we're seeing in todays political arena.
sterban 9y ago
I built https://statesreport.com https://statesreport.com because I found Google News lacking. The goal being a highly optimized news aggregator that doesn't use ML to create an echo chamber of news you agree with.
howard941 9y ago
Pro: News sites I never want to see are finally gone from the editors recommendations. Cons: White space as far as the eye can see, no more article preview, much less content available with a lot more scrolling, slow on my i5. All in all it's a dogs lunch
Jordrok 9y ago
Gotta say, I'm not a fan of this redesign. Others have touched on the biggest issues - lack of information density and missing article snippets, but here's the one I really can't figure out: Why is the left sidebar so crazily wide? There's at least an inch of wasted space and none of the bar's items even come close to using the full width.
throwaway1892 9y ago
I was disappointed by their redesign and I think I won't be using it much. There is too much wasted space, the banner at the top is useless (for how I use the site) and the selection of article for a story is too limited, only 3 compared to a dozen in the old design. At least this afternoon I still had access to the old design by disconnecting.
too_optimistic 9y ago
Redesigning Google News for everyone (who isn't using a desktop browser)
rockland1 9y ago
The allegiance to an ideologically driven monopoly that is stripping basic news search features is undeserved. There are alternatives that provide full featured search and ideologically neutral alternatives such as https://Newslookup.com https://Newslookup.com
anigbrowl 9y ago
Way to take something mediocre and make it truly awful. I'm not trying to be witty here, this is one of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen. Every single aspect of it is worse and I have no idea what benefit it's supposed to be offering. It's like something that was designed by someone who hates reading and has little or no interest in news. I wish it could be a great opportunity for someone else but it would probably be quite difficult for a small vendor to effectively aggregate so many different news sources. Suggestions welcome, but I've already been looking for a while :-/
cliveb 9y ago
The Google News redesign makes reading the news difficult. My 24 inch vertical monitor- right have nav has 11 inches x 3 1/4 inches of blank grey space. Too much blank space to content ratio. You had one job...

198 points by sndean 9y ago

Horrible!!!! I have been using this product for years, suddenly they make this change without the option to rollback. I can't search, I can't filter. If these options are there I can't find them. These usability experts... how can they fail so miserably at times.

uberuberuber 9y ago

A giant leap backwards in information density. The "in the news" section is just trending hashtag fluff. "Easier Navigation" == More clicks to access the same content. And best of all... no option in settings to opt out.

puzzle 9y ago
What Project Kennedy tried to do and wasn't allowed to once the pitchforks came out, Material Design has successfully accomplished. I spent ten minutes trying to find the setting for a compact layout (like the Kennedy versions of Gmail and News eventually supported). Ugh.
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  I really do dislike it when tools start "simplifying" at the expense of their most invested users. While that cohort isn't always the most vocal, they're generally the most stable userbase. It really doesn't feel like that additional risk of abandonment is accounted for in the multi-armed bandit testing.
  - puzzle 9y ago
    To be fair, there's something that is actually more advanced. In the settings, you can now block sources you don't ever want to see, by entering names. Before, you had to play the lottery of "wait until this stupid source with auto-generated news items based on stock tickers and press releases shows up in the right bar". That's the only place where you had the option to block them. You couldn't do it in the main section in the middle, which is where they tended to appear most often. I just added a bunch. Now, if I could follow Entertainment news about rock bands, without getting junk about the Kardashians and WWE...
  - seanlinehan 9y ago
    It practice it tends to be the exact opposite. Your most invested users tend to be the most vocal and least likely to represent the majority of your user base. The additional risk of abandonment of the entrenched super-users is usually 1. accepted in favor of appealing to a new, larger group of people 2. usually far less than those users will tell you. The Flexport blog has a great post on this: https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrage-50f42f2dc8a4 https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrag...
eyelidlessness 9y ago
I'm getting older and I have poor eyesight. The information density of the old design was a huge distraction for me, making it very difficult to actually read the news. Whitespace can be incredibly helpful for readability.
- magoghm 9y ago
  I agree that whitespace is helpful for readability, but the amount of whitespace they're using is overkill.

philipkglass 9y ago

I dearly hope that they restore advanced search options and access to all search-matches. It's currently a nightmarish Playskool version of yesterday's Google News, suitable for ages 6-12. I like to search for specific topics in time buckets, e.g. "wind power" in the past day or "spectroscopy" in the past week. Maybe even search between specific user-specified dates if I'm diving into the history of a complex topic. Now I can't specify the time range and can't see all matching results even for the search terms I turn into a dedicated section. It's as limited and frustrating as Google News on Android. They've also hidden the snippet text that let me quickly judge whether or not I wanted to click through to a full article. Presumably that's to protect themselves against European copyright disputes, but it's a big step backward for users. I'm trying Bing News for the first time today. It still has snippets and time ranges, but also lets me see only a small fraction of the stories that match my search criteria. Yahoo News apparently doesn't permit time based searches at all. What other products best fill this Google News-shaped void for news power-searchers? EDIT: for now I can get the old, powerful Google News by initiating a regular Google search and then clicking over to the News tab. But I wouldn't count on this escape hatch remaining much longer :-(

niutech 9y ago
If you don't like it, you can get back to the classic version of Google News by installing the User-Agent Switcher for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switche...) and switching the user agent string on Google News to Windows Phone 8.
- fosco 9y ago
  confirmed, this works. Thank you. guess this is a reason to learn python and try scraping google news and headlines to look more like a hackernews page with article descriptions. my python-fu is low so if anyone thinks this is 'easy' or already done please let me know.

augustocallejas 9y ago

This redesign has the look and feel of the Facebook feed plus Trending section on the upper-right hand side. With so many people consuming news from Facebook[1], this is not surprising at all. Maybe Google News is where the Google Plus feed will ultimately show up. [1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-s-adults-get-news-on-facebook/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...

rocky1138 9y ago

Does anyone anywhere think this is good? Why? Material design, in my opinion, is a disaster. Especially for desktop, where screens are huge and existing UI feedback loops are in place and well known.

RachelF 9y ago
Looks like Google news has employed the Windows 10 UI designers from Microsoft.
- NDT 9y ago
  RachelFGuitar?
bluthru 9y ago
A grey background was dingy when Material Design was introduced and it's still dingy today. The previous News design was much cleaner. With some tweaking it would be much preferred to all of the superfluous cards.
Raphael 9y ago
I'll take the redesign on mobile gladly. The horizontal cards from the last redesign were a travesty.

z6 9y ago

At first glance I'm not a fan, but I'll give it some time. So much white space. I wish they give us a compact option.

seanf 9y ago

I left feedback that the sidebars should be collapsable. I also miss seeing the lede under each headline. Even the "Full Coverage" view is missing a preview of article content. Perhaps an issue with fair use? Regular users will not need that left sidebar to be reminded of what sections they have configured for the page, and it takes up a large amount of screen space. The right sidebar might be useful to more people, but the "In the News" block is just words and phrases pulled from the main content. It seems redundant. Overall I like the fresh look. Google News is one of the few sites I have been visiting almost every day for well over a decade now!

eatbitseveryday 9y ago
> the sidebars should be collapsable > Regular users will not need that left sidebar It is collapsable, but I could not determine from your writing if you figured it out; click the Main Menu icon in the top left. I agree, there is often more whitespace added with new "revisions" to Google services - Gmail, G+, News, Hangouts, etc.
- seanf 9y ago
  Thanks! No, I did not notice that hamburger menu +50px away :)
dreamcompiler 9y ago
Yes! Sort of a Craigslist meets old-style Fark for news. This is exactly the way a news site should look.

r1b 9y ago

I am working on https://news.r1b.solutions https://news.r1b.solutions out of frustration with Google News. Goals include: * Wire services only * Fast, minimal interface * Global perspective I am currently focused on adding wire services from non-western countries.

RubyPinch 9y ago
If you don't mind me asking, how are you getting the data? just site scraping each source?
- r1b 9y ago
  It comes from Twitter! It is v expensive to directly subscribe to each wire service - also difficult to maintain scrapers for each. Many services already post links to Twitter - for the ones that don't it is easy to create an account driven by a scraper & maintain the common interface. You can check out the code here: https://github.com/r1b/news-wires https://github.com/r1b/news-wires
ilamont 9y ago
I would like this, if only to eliminate the fluff and click bait that dominates unfiltered Google News. For the service you are developing, is there a way to control the topics shown, or eliminate certain subjects or keywords from the display? One comment about using wire services from other countries: Many of them are government-sponsored or otherwise controlled by the government/ruling political parties, and therefore can be quite biased in their presentation of local or regional news. Xinhua, Taiwan's Central News Agency, and Voice of America are examples.
- r1b 9y ago
  Thank you for your thoughtful comment. Filters are on the ROADMAP.md - I am interested in allowing users to create different "views" of the firehose (e.g via presence / absence of keywords) that function in a similar way to Google Alerts. I am aware of the bias that exists in many wire services & I appreciate the reminder. Some would say that there is a significant (western) bias in the services already that I have made available! I am still struggling to find a way to present a global perspective while still making people aware of these prejudices. One of my favorite wire services I have encountered is the Non-Aligned Movement News Network (http://namnewsnetwork.org/v3/index.php http://namnewsnetwork.org/v3/index.php), which was established to publish news that is not controlled by the interests of major world powers.

ekianjo 9y ago

> https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/06.19.17_before-after_katrinat.width-1000.png https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... It's not designed for readability, it's designed for less density of information. It's easy to do that by putting space everywhere, but the real challenge is keeping the same kind of information density while making it more readable. Really disappointed by their redesign.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
The result could be summarised as: We made it look more (exactly) like Facebook. Which has proven to be wildly popular.
UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
I'm just glad the new design works better on a touch screen. Had to massively zoom the page before to click two links individually.
makecheck 9y ago
The lack of density is why I am constantly using "request desktop site" for things like Reddit, too. Sometimes we don't need a "design" so much as a list of links.
isomorphic 9y ago
If you view the new Google "News" from a desktop browser with a narrow width (well, narrow for these days--1024 pixels, so I can actually have other windows on my screen), the "content" takes up about a third of the page. The other two thirds is wasted. Even within the "content," tremendous amounts of space is wasted, and less information is present than before.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  - Everyone runs their browsers maximised don't-cha-know... I really don't, yet I've been noticing over the past few years my browser window width has been steadily getting wider to accommodate modern website design.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xname2 9y ago

Even from their example, you can see the political bias clearly in the first pic. I believe that they believe themselves have an unbiased algorithm which creates this result, which they believe is unbiased. However, it is clear to me, their result is definitely biased. I do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a top list of covering on the supreme court decision on the travel ban only includes reports from NYT, WP, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune (the only right), CNN. I also do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a list of other top stories from only Politico, NPR, WP. So In a list of nine titles, only one right media (Chicago Tribune) got a shot, but not Fox News or WSJ. Not even CBS, ABC which are kind of centrist. Of course, an argument would be that most of the media is left. But don't forget, the left / right split among the American voters is not that extreme. If you generate a list of new reports, which one is more unbiased: A) represent the perspective of journalists (90% left), B) represent the perspective of voters (60% left)? My experience with Google News is that, if you do not manually customize new feed, you will get mostly from NYT and WP, almost never FN or WSJ. You will also get a lot far / crazy left stuff from Huffington post, Daily Beast, Mother Jones, but you will never get national review, not to mention breitbart.

tacomonstrous 9y ago
Fox News is hardly news these days. Today their front page headline was about the Obamas being on vacation. This, on a day when the Senate Republicans fell flat on their face on healthcare. Wonder why that only got a small mention way at the bottom. Even now the main headline is about Palin suing the NYT. Your basic problem is viewing this as a left/right divide, when it's really a reasonable journalism/explicitly partisan reporting divide. Conservatives have been trained by decades of talk radio to think this way, and now all they have left on their side is a bunch of charlatans. CNN or MSNBC aren't paragons of virtue, but at least they are not completely disingenuous hucksters like the ones Fox trots out all the time. Hell, MSNBC even features their own right-wing charlatan in Hugh Hewitt.
- xname2 9y ago
  Your premise is that Google News only include news, which is totally wrong. Google News includes lots of comments. For example, Huffington post appears a lot in Google News.

oblib 9y ago

Personally, I think using "Snopes" as a fact checking source gives it much more credibility than it deserves. And the whole idea of publishing "Fact Checks" like this sounds and feels Orwellian. I don't mean to say that I don't trust those media fact checkers who dig into claims made by competing media sources, but I don't trust them 100% and I've seen blatant spin in too many "Fact Check" claims to not have to fact check them too. Hell, I don't even trust Google search results anymore.

smt88 9y ago
Examples of Snopes or other reputable fact checkers being wrong or biased?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  They rarely lie about straight facts, but the WashPo checker obviously slants their "half lie", "pants on fire" "mostly true" measures as politically convenient. Most people are too lazy to read the full details.
  - smt88 9y ago
    Example(s)? I read the full details. There were several situations in which I thought they were being too diplomatic regarding the Clinton email scandal (meaning they were being unnecessarily harsh on Clinton).
- oblib 9y ago
  I think this is pretty bias: http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cancerous-herbicide-in-food/ http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...
  - smt88 9y ago
    How so? They explain their reasoning, and it's independently verifiable. I was especially impressed by the note at the bottom: > "NOTE: This story has been updated based on discussions with a number of scientists in the field. It was originally listed as a MIXTURE, but we have now reclassified it as FALSE in response to concerns that our original narrative might have led viewers into taking the results of an activist group’s lab analyses as a scientifically rigorous addition to the debate."

iamthepieman 9y ago

anything branded google for content consumption I avoid or mitigate with other sources. I use gmail because I almost entirely control that (unsubscribe, spam filters, user filters and auto forwarding) Unless they are actively deleting email sent to me and changing the content of email I am getting exactly what I want to get in my inbox I use Google search in conjunction with duck duck go, bing, content aggregators, offline sources and for things i don't care about the source or that doesn't really have a possibility of bias (weather forecast, traffic) or when i know that the google search is really just a quick way to search something else (stack overflow, wikipedia) the google new tab interface on mobile has such abominable suggestions that I quit using chrome on mobile (helps that I don't have a phone, just a tablet for e-reading, music and causal games) Maybe it would have better suggestions if I turned on google tracking (app and website) or if I turned off the VPN and anonymizing proxy on my router - yeah right.

jMyles 9y ago

First reaction: OK, what do we use instead of Google News now?

watter 9y ago
It isn't the answer you're looking for but it is all that comes to mind: Drudge.
JoshMnem 9y ago
An RSS reader that fetches articles from a few news sources that you like.
- lukateake 9y ago
  I've missed Google Reader for a long, long time.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    As a non-Google Reader user, what did it offer that Feedly doesn't on the free tier?
    - lukateake 9y ago
      Stats, sir. Stats. Plus, some killer search functionality obviously.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    There are many alternatives now, Feedbin and Feedly to name a couple.
  - lloeki 9y ago
    Digg Reader fits the bill
  - Theizestooke 9y ago
    Get Tiny Tiny RSS. It's a blessing. https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home

glorithm 9y ago

And yet this is not sync with Play Newsstand. Is product management a thing at Google these days? Or they like many concurrent experiments by different teams don't talk to each other?

colordrops 9y ago

A new design can't hide the fact that news aggregated through google seems to have a strong ideological bent. I've spent a lot of time setting up the weighting of various news sites and still can't seem to get certain agendas filtered out of the news. Perhaps this is a problem with news in general and only reflected through Google News, but I don't think so - things have gotten worse over time and certain sites seem to be over-represented.

ajmurmann 9y ago
I've been concerned about my need intake being too biased and started using a app called "read across the aisle". It has news sources categorized by political position and tracks how balanced your news diet is. Maybe that can help you not being negatively impacted by certain agendas since you are more likely to get a balanced view?
- panic 9y ago
  The concept of "sides" and where the lines are drawn between them are part of the agenda: you're not escaping it. If every morning you're reading Fox News and The Huffington Post, you're getting "both sides" but not much insight.
blackguardx 9y ago
Which sites are over represented for you? I think google uses people's browsing habits to show them "personalized" news. Google seems to have miscategorized me. It exposed me to some crazy fringe news outlets (Breitbart) at first, but now it is just annoying.

bpodgursky 9y ago

Ugh. This means the two-column view is disappearing (it was an option in labs). Infuriating that phone-driven design is destroying the desktop experience.

ekianjo 9y ago
Thats been the trend for years now with the "mobile first" principle advocated by bootstrap and many others. Very sad trend overall.
- cratermoon 9y ago
  It's based on trends, though. Look at the traffic stats for any major website and mobile is outpacing desktop everywhere.
  - bpodgursky 9y ago
    Yeah and I get that you'd do mobile first as a startup, but Google news probably has > 100mm daily views, you'd think they could afford the extra .5 engineers it takes to maintain the old UI.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Yes but Id rather have a choice instead of being force fed a mobile UI on my desktop monitor.
  - twhb 9y ago
    I see that quoted a lot, and never really dug into. - What about purchases? I'd bet that the vast majority of online - not in-app - purchases happen on desktop. - Are these companies devoting extra resources to their mobile websites and to marketing them?
  - beezle 9y ago
    I thought the whole idea with html5 and responsive this and that was the ability to very easily serve one layout for mobile and another for traditional desktop. This redesign is god awful for desktop use. The Bing alternative is only marginally better. I honestly have no idea who they test these on before release to think they are a) good and b) an improvement.

dreamcompiler 9y ago

I had already pretty much stopped using GN because it was so overburdened with Javascript that pages refused to scroll. (And that was on Android, which you'd think Google would optimize for.) Now it seems to scroll well enough, but you have to scroll a lot more because the information density is so low. Yet another website designed to impress rather than inform. Not interested.

dayaz36 9y ago

It seems like they've also changed the algorithm. I'm getting completely irrelevant articles to what I search for. For example if you search for "Chobani" the top articles are about Yoplait(??)...then there is a bunch of results about Alex Jones interview with Megyn Kelly(???)...I know there was a whole debacle between Alex Jones and Chobani but these articles are not even about that. They're about Alex Jone's interview with Megyn Kelly. Maybe they'll have a sentence or two in the article about the incident with Chobani but these articles have nothing to do with Chobani! I'm just using one example, it's like this for everything I search for. https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/chobani/chobani?hl=en&ned=us https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/chobani/choban...

gnufied 9y ago
Yep yep - they either changed the Algorithm or did something stupid with the UI. For example, searching for "H4 EAD" on news.google.com returns nothing now - new - https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/h4%20ead/h4%20ead?hl=en&ned=us https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/h4%20ead/h4%20... VS Old - https://tinyurl.com/y9tf8cou https://tinyurl.com/y9tf8cou Very weird.
- Jordrok 9y ago
  Oh wow, now that is really bad. I would assume that would have to be a bug, but it seems like a pretty massive thing to overlook.

fragmede 9y ago

And yet, ditching Google's much-maligned AMP project is not discussed at all. If this were a wholistic attempt at a redesign by an no outside party, AMP and its detractors reasons would at least merit a mention.

mythrwy 9y ago

I suppose this is an anti-example of using your "market dominance in one area to gain unfair competitive advantage"?

dgudkov 9y ago

Google Now suggests interesting news on my Android phone. After a bit of training it I now find 40-50% of suggested articles worth reading (which is a rather high ratio). Google News had a different selection algorithm that is not so "trainable" and therefore less efficient (despite being linked to the same account). It would be great if besides the new UI for the News they also started using the selection algorithm from Google Now.

visarga 9y ago

It's more readable but I hate the horizontal menu bar. I use a MacBook Pro and the screen is already short and wide. Taking valuable vertical space is bad, when there is so much more horizontal space. Another: why cut titles at 10 words short? There is so much empty space around, but I can't read the last 2 words of the title without opening the article. What I love the most: having the entities extracted from text and entity-centric news navigation.

cm2187 9y ago

I hope scrolling on an ipad now works (not a small feature for a website, but html is fun to break). I wonder if they also fixed the picture problem. They seemed to collect a random picture on the website of the article and associate it with the story on the front page of google news. This leads to terrible associations, like you would have a headline about the Queen of England illustrated with a mugshot of a thug, or an article about some rapist being arrested illustrated by a movie star that happened to promote a movie the same day.

cm2187 9y ago
Actually for scrolling on the ipad I can confirm they didn't fix it. It is stilly very jerky.
Tempest1981 9y ago
iPad scrolling is really jerky, and no tap to return to the top. Sometimes it flickers between 2 scroll positions, vibrating at 60 fps. Hope it's not deliberate. How is it on Android?

exodust 9y ago

The problem that has plagued Google News at least here in Australia for some time is the regular inclusion of headlines that redirect to paywalls. These links need to be flagged as paywall only, otherwise it's no different to the kind of behaviour Google claims to be against - links not accurately representing their destination. It's about link integrity. Nobody wants to play "roll the dice" every time they click a news article, with some asking for a credit card, others not. No doubt the paywall services pay Google to include those links, but Google should be honest and correctly label paywall links on the Google News page, or stop including those news outlets that use these redirect tactics. Apart from that, the redesign seems to be re-inventing link hover style. Mouse over a section and every link in that section turns blue, not just the link you're hovering over. I'd prefer if the main headlines stood out more for easier scanning, keep them always blue for example, and the other text black. Or just keep links blue and non-links black. Right now it all seems to blend in, without enough visual separation. I'll be visiting less, and might jump over to Feedly or similar.

porjo 9y ago
As a fellow Australian, I used to browse to news.google.com.au and see predominantly Australian news. Now, I get redirected to news.google.com and see no Australian content! (no, I'm not signed into Google) I really hope that gets fixed. EDIT: this URL gets me Australian news: https://news.google.com/news/headlines?ned=au&hl=en-AU https://news.google.com/news/headlines?ned=au&hl=en-AU

jacquesm 9y ago

The biggest improvement they could make to Google news is to do better selection of sources. With some regularity I get 'breitbartnews' as one of the things that I should supposedly be interested in.

strooper 9y ago

Google News has been the first page of any news media for me for last several years. I have relied on the the summery of the news under the headlines to consider whether to go to the news details or skip to the next news. And this latest redesign removes that summery. I can't think of any reason to using it as the first source of news any longer, unless Google decides to revert to last design.

richardw 9y ago

Cards, cards everywhere. Not using the full width of large screens. Not a fan yet, but maybe I'll warm to it. Or it'll be like when they changed the effect of "+" in search and I'll hate it but it'll work perfectly for Grandma (since I assume they've tested this a lot). We are after all a set of people who like the HN amount of news density. News is such an alluring area for change. It kinda sucks. I see the same stories for many days on Google News, can't mark it as "read"/"hide"/"don't care about this topic". Would prefer that over a new look.

amelius 9y ago

It doesn't have a "comments" section? That's a missed opportunity, imho.

thewhitetulip 9y ago

I am a regular user of google news and the color combination hurts my eyes and the main reason why I used google news till now was that I would read the gist. now, the hover function hurts my eyes too blue color (perhaps the people at Google have very high end monitors) and there is no two-three lines, just the title. Sigh. Google news is now successfully destroyed like Quora was few years ago.

corford 9y ago

I can't believe they've got rid of the text snippets below the headline (why??) but I like the dedicated fact check box!

luord 9y ago

I stopped using Google news because too often the same news piece appeared several times in the RSS feed. If these features address that, particularly labels, maybe I can get back to getting news from there, but the comments here aren't encouraging. I'll check it out myself anyway.

fosco 9y ago

Here is a redesign that does not increase efficiency, my opinion of course. Now more of my page has less information and in my opinion my goal is to consume more information in less space. this is terrible. http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/ http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

xemdetia 9y ago

Can Google stop making these backwards layout changes? The old version is key logical headlines and related articles from multiple sources which was actually pretty nice as an aggregator. Now there is only one related article instead of 3. The plaintext version of the page because of the horizontal bar is now even harder to use. It feels like I need to make a site just to undo google changes and just give me a list of links again.

kogepathic 9y ago

Good lord this redesign is terribad. I can't even limit news stories to a time period as I can regular Google search results. I guess it will make Google News appeal more to Joe Everyman, but holy cow it is a blow to being able to find news stories for a specific period of time (e.g. only show me stories on "am4 itx" within the last week, so I don't read blogs reposting news about a "new" motherboard 3 months after it was announced) And yet Google continues to ignore Google Finance, which is by far the least updated Google operated site I've seen in ages. I mean, you still have to install Adobe Flash to get interactive charts, and the basic charts are simply an image. Seriously now?! Every other finance site has had fully HTML5 interactive charts since years.

bra-ket 9y ago

this is terrible, they really ruined a good product

visarga 9y ago

It would be amazing to have this kind of service operate over reddit, HN, Twitter, other forums and blog comments and tag them with 1000s of categories. I want to select only specific posts from all these sources. What Google has now is a collection of mainstream press classified in just a few subjects, almost the opposite of what I want.

malloci 9y ago

I have mixed feelings about the ability to block certain sources. On the one hand it's nice to be able to block random blogs or poorly written sources (in the grammatical sense) that somehow make their way into the google news docket. On the other hand, I worry that this will only increase the polarization we're seeing in todays political arena.

sterban 9y ago

I built https://statesreport.com https://statesreport.com because I found Google News lacking. The goal being a highly optimized news aggregator that doesn't use ML to create an echo chamber of news you agree with.

howard941 9y ago

Pro: News sites I never want to see are finally gone from the editors recommendations. Cons: White space as far as the eye can see, no more article preview, much less content available with a lot more scrolling, slow on my i5. All in all it's a dogs lunch

Jordrok 9y ago

Gotta say, I'm not a fan of this redesign. Others have touched on the biggest issues - lack of information density and missing article snippets, but here's the one I really can't figure out: Why is the left sidebar so crazily wide? There's at least an inch of wasted space and none of the bar's items even come close to using the full width.

throwaway1892 9y ago

I was disappointed by their redesign and I think I won't be using it much. There is too much wasted space, the banner at the top is useless (for how I use the site) and the selection of article for a story is too limited, only 3 compared to a dozen in the old design. At least this afternoon I still had access to the old design by disconnecting.

too_optimistic 9y ago

Redesigning Google News for everyone (who isn't using a desktop browser)

rockland1 9y ago

The allegiance to an ideologically driven monopoly that is stripping basic news search features is undeserved. There are alternatives that provide full featured search and ideologically neutral alternatives such as https://Newslookup.com https://Newslookup.com

anigbrowl 9y ago

Way to take something mediocre and make it truly awful. I'm not trying to be witty here, this is one of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen. Every single aspect of it is worse and I have no idea what benefit it's supposed to be offering. It's like something that was designed by someone who hates reading and has little or no interest in news. I wish it could be a great opportunity for someone else but it would probably be quite difficult for a small vendor to effectively aggregate so many different news sources. Suggestions welcome, but I've already been looking for a while :-/

cliveb 9y ago

The Google News redesign makes reading the news difficult. My 24 inch vertical monitor- right have nav has 11 inches x 3 1/4 inches of blank grey space. Too much blank space to content ratio. You had one job...