13 ms·

Google to add 'news feed' to website and app

167 points by codefined 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yohui 9y ago
Google's blog post talks about introducing the newsfeed to the Google app, but I don't see any mention of Google.com: https://www.blog.google/products/search/feed-your-need-know/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/feed-your-need-know/ Anyone know where the BBC found this confirmation?
- quarterbox 9y ago
  I think they weren't being precise and just meant how the app will look, which some people might equate with google.com itself. I don't see any reason to believe it would affect the site.
  - yohui 9y ago
    Perhaps the BBC spoke to someone at Google who said the news feed would be available via the web – à la https://news.google.com https://news.google.com or https://newsstand.google.com/ https://newsstand.google.com/ – which the reporter misunderstood to mean Google.com itself would display the news feed? It just seems anomalous that such a great change would be announced with so little fanfare (a single sentence in the article). I need to see confirmation before I believe it.
    - yohui 9y ago
      Update: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/google-denies-claims-of-a-desktop-google-com-revamp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/google-denies-claims...
- azinman2 9y ago
  The iPhone app has it already.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    as does the android app - has for a long time. The only announcement here seems to be that they're putting some marketing behind it and calling it a capital-P Product, instead of just being a feature of the app. If they're actually adding it to Google.com that's newsworthy, but i think that's just the BBC misinterpreting something.
pasbesoin 9y ago
Really, Google, all I want is my search-oriented "plus" operator back, and for you to unfuck search. I would have bought into the other Plus, your social network, but you fucked over your base product (search) during its launch, and then went all "real names" et al. on us.
- empressplay 9y ago
  If you click on Tools and then change "All Results" to "Verbatim", then it behaves a bit more like it used to
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    I can't find this on Google.com - is it just in the App ?
    - Terr_ 9y ago
      From the search-results page, there's a "Tools" button which exposes a bar containing "Any Time, All Results". Click "All Results" and it exposes "Verbatim" as another choice. There might be a more-permanent way to set it if you are logged-in, but I don't usually do that for Google for privacy reasons.
      - Jaruzel 9y ago
        Aha. thank you. It would seem the magic is: &tbs=li:1 On the URL. As I use a custom search page as my home page, I shall alter it accordingly.
to_bpr 9y ago
>The feed will include news stories from a variety of publishers, to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, where people follow only content aligned with their pre-existing point of view. >"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post. I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with how Google, Facebook etc. are now positioning themselves in terms of what news and sources they believe we should and should not consume. If this piece is true and this update isn't confined to the Google app then I think it may be the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Google products.
- ehnto 9y ago
  They wouldn't be in the position to guide content if it weren't for users submitting that choice to them. I agree with your sentiment and I too am uncomfortable with it, but we the individuals should take responsibility and ownership of our consumption. It sounds like you are preparing to do so, but I don't have high hopes for society at large. I might extrapolate that at some point I would have pinned the blame entirely on Google, and then rattled about how they have a "social responsibility" and perhaps that's still true. But I am seeing that really, we took the spade to dig a flowerbed, and haven't wavered a bit as it's deepened into a grave.
  - to_bpr 9y ago
    I share your outlook on the future of society with regards to its relationship of the mass with technology and privacy. If anything the last decade has shown us, it's that the average person will readily sacrifice freedom and privacy for security and convenience at the earliest opportunity and almost entirely without question or protest. With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have from its users to essentially bulk collect and analyze their data may largely stem from ignorance as to what is being collected and how it's being used i.e. the relationship between the content one produces in Gmail and the ads that same person receives. That's a tightly coupled, straightforward relationship too. I've no doubt that the average person has zero idea what is involved when Google touts that it can now confidently track an ad being served/viewed online to an in-store, in-person purchase offline. Then again, with the Snowden leaks and similar and the absolutely apathetic (at best) reaction from the public at large, maybe convenience merely trumps all and will forever more.
cartyboi29 9y ago
Lmfao can't wait for the virgin 30 year olds on the site to start crying about this
monochromatic 9y ago
Google's services just get worse and worse these days. Used to be so damn good. Sad.
pesenti 9y ago
20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....
- flyingprogram 9y ago
  Great startup idea!
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    Someone already did it! https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
    - atupis 9y ago
      Some weird reason duckduckgo usually gives worse search results than google.
      - iagooar 9y ago
        The reason is Google probably has 100x the money, and 1000x the expertise. I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google. I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
        SkyMarshal 9y ago
        Possibly more data too. AI + more data = more useful results.
      - Insanity 9y ago
        I have been using DDG for a long time now and have never had that problem. Except with images. So I still use google for that.:-)
aphextron 9y ago
The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the official endorsement of sites like breitbart.com by the White House, and I don't think there's any going back. It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Let's not forget that standard media diet includes Fox News and One America Network (which has ~15% the viewer count of Fox News). Old media isn't necessarily great at filtering out nonsense. Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.
  - headmelted 9y ago
    As a longtime Guardian reader, I'd be careful about implicitly declaring the Guardian as any more "legitimate" than anyone else. Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market. (I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).
    - drizzt396 9y ago
      That recent article about the rebellious self-owned Greek factory was case in point. Great story, but the journalism was lacking significantly.
    - BigJono 9y ago
      Yep, I read the Guardian's Australian edition every now and then and some of their stuff is absolute rubbish. I'd love to know what the go-to center-left news source is over here. So far I haven't found it...
pryelluw 9y ago
Took long enough. The next step will be adding a Google+ integrated commenting system. But why? Attention (which is Google's main product) is now captivated by the social networks. Google must adapt or lose market share. What is interesting is how they have not been able to really break into social. What about Google makes it so difficult for them to do just that?
- Jedi72 9y ago
  It's very important that people working on things like human social interaction be able to do things like invert binary trees. They only hire the best.
0xbear 9y ago
And it goes without saying that the news sources preferences will reflect those of Google's predominantly liberal top brass.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  I suspect you're correct, despite any assurances to the contrary. And any bias might not even be by design but rather just a result of the biases of the people who make the feature.
shadowmint 9y ago
It's hard to believe this is going to happen to google.com Google is, if nothing else, obsessed with metrics; unless they'd A/B/... tested this to death, there is zero chance they'll roll it out to their homepage. I can't believe it, and it's not mentioned anywhere on their blog post. To be fair, most people probably search from the chrome toolbar now, but even so, I imagine at most, we'll see a staged roll out to a cohort to test it.
- lugg 9y ago
  Most "normal" people I observe either type in google.com, use a separate search box, or click a bookmark that goes to google.com. Rarely do I see them searching using the url box. That's where web addresses go silly!
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  Being obsessed with metrics is the exact reason something like this would go through. All companies that design to metrics instead of vision always ship the worst UI/UX crimes. This is the ideology we have to thank for things like the lightbox sign up forms that block or lock out content if you try to browse without an account on FB/Pintrest etc. You're assuming the metric Google is designing for is still how fast a user gets what they want off site. What if the metric they're designing for is how long someone spends in the Google ecosystem?
  - BorisMelnik 9y ago
    on that note...how on earth is it possibly that the "im feeling lucky" button is still doing something for them?
dabei 9y ago
The title is a bit clickbaity. It's a news feed. I don't see how it's related to Facebook.
rajeshmr 9y ago
Seems like bad news to me! :( However, one could easily start using "startpage.com" or duckduckgo.com with "!google <your search string>" - both deliver results from google!
annon 9y ago
This seems much more like Apple News than Facebook.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
Have we gone back in time? The idea of a newsfeed is ancient, pre-dating the interne. The only difference is that this time around the feed only shows you what you want to see. Scary shit.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
corndoge 9y ago
I had to double check to see if I had woken up from a coma and it was in fact April 1, 2018, but no. What a way to destroy the most iconic webpage in history.
- euyyn 9y ago
  I would guess non-logged in access would still yield the all-white page?
chartreusek 9y ago
Didn't they try basically this before, then had it fail and discontinue in the form of iGoogle(2005-2013)? The idea of google going back to that is just nuts. At least DuckDuckGo has got the search page concept right.
- azinman2 9y ago
  This seems to auto-populate which is different, and is far simpler. iGoogle was widget based and relied on you to pick the info sources.
  - dx034 9y ago
    But iGoogle still was very popular. It was killed despite being used by many because Google decided everyone should use Google+ from now on.
- andygates 9y ago
  They definitely discontinued it, but that doesn't mean it failed. What do you think made them kill it? At the time, it felt like textbook Google capriciousness (see Reader, etc).
  - fwn 9y ago
    I expected it to be a strategic push towards their more interactive content aggregation feature built into Google+.
septarol 9y ago
Who cares your privacy.
partiallypro 9y ago
I use Bing's news section (on their home page) all the time, syncs with Cortana. I assume this will be similar. I'm sure they will let you hide it, even Bing does that.
roystonvassey 9y ago
Do people even visit google.com anymore? I just type in the address bar of browsers.
zentlim 9y ago
Interesting. On first glance I was thinking the article was pertaining to Google Plus. It was talking about the website after all - "Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage - Google.com". This made it a lot interesting. Google Plus doesn't seem to be making it in our country. But Google Search has been here for a long time. The front end of it didn't change much for as long as I can remember. (The back end though seem to be mutating like a monster.) I wonder how they're planning to target who sees what kind of content. But I think they pretty much have enough data gathered from all the email accounts and search results that everyone has been feeding them. Looking forward to this update and more importantly how people will react to it.
usaphp 9y ago
Who visits google.com anyway? I am pretty sure majority of those users who aren't interested in seeing these news are already using google search via browser address bar. Only those who go to google.com will see these news , and they seem to be an exact type of people who would enjoy such content and spend hours browsing it generating more revenue to google
- riffraff 9y ago
  I don't, but I like google now on my phone, and occasionally hit news.google. so, if google.com includes those two, I might start to visit it while on desktop.
- Andrenid 9y ago
  Google.com is the home/start page for a looooot of people.
- adamzerner 9y ago
  It's the world's most visited website. > Google is known for its sparse homepage, which, though mostly white space, has, according to analytics firm Alexa Internet, become the world's most-visited website.
- dyukqu 9y ago
  Majority of regular users (who do not care or even know about any kind of online privacy, open web, net neutrality etc.) I interact with go to google.com, write down e.g. "facebook" and then log in! They don't even know they can use url bar for searching (let alone typing xyz.com directly). It makes my blood boil every time I see that. I try to explain, they usually just don't care to listen/understand. Coming from other thread about Firefox marketshare, it's mostly this kind of users that kill the open web and help billion-dollar walled-gardens prosper. There are billions of them.
  - mvdwoord 9y ago
    Paraphrasing something else... this is probably what actual hell is like. Having to watch people browse the web in this way. Indefinitely.
handedness 9y ago
Without Marissa Mayer is there really nobody senior enough at Google to successfully fight such a bad idea?
welcomebrand 9y ago
I can't wait for them to add a stories UI so I can see what my friends are searching for while I'm searching.
spookyuser 9y ago
Dear God. I can barely handle the news snippets that have started appearing in Google Now, I'm actually really close to disabling the entire thing because of them. I guess this means they're not going away anytime soon.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  I disabled them after about a day and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I have about as much respect for news/trivia noise as the ads you hear in call hold music.
  - spookyuser 9y ago
    Please tell me how? Is there a way to disable them without disabling google now?
    - verytrivial 9y ago
      Nope! There's no way. Funny, that. (Same goes for Google's new-ish "share location" feature of Maps. Want that? Then you'll have to share and record you location for all apps. And you have to hunt into settings to re-disable it EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's a feature! Basically a Trojan horse for Google's "record everything" business need, but less immediately threatening. A Trojan gnat, perhaps.)
verytrivial 9y ago
Dear Google, my concentration is a valuable resource to me. Please don't fritter it away. (In practical terms, please don't remove the option to disable the trivia feed.)
- majewsky 9y ago
  Custom style sheet to the rescue.
beambot 9y ago
If only there was a system to create "feeds" of website entries (such as news sites), aggregate them, and then read them at our discretion. Then we could each create our own personal Google homepage. Google could brand such an offering as "Google reader" and "Google personalized homepage"... (For those who don't remember: these both used to be a thing!) </Bitterness>
- crowbahr 9y ago
  See but that gives you, the consumer, toouch control over what you see. They don't want it to be your choice.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    Yea if they gave you the choice not screw yourself over, then you wouldn't be able to get screwed over by Google </sarcasm>
  - euyyn 9y ago
    Google Reader was made open source, to be fair, and has plenty of replacements too.
- crispytx 9y ago
  I think that's sort of what RSS was going for, but it doesn't seem to have really taken off. Maybe we need an RSS 2.0.
  - beambot 9y ago
    RSS did take off... Google released their free reader, which grabbed (probably) 80% market share with 1-2 engineers maintaining it. Then it was killed (to the VERY loud protestations of the internet) for no apparent reason.
orbitingpluto 9y ago
What I want to know about Google's news feed priorities is what possessed them to think it's a good idea to completely overtake the Play Newsstand app? To access a magazine subscription, you must open Play Newsstand, click on the Library icon now relocated to the bottom (as they've culled all options from the hamburger menu), then scroll down every single news feed source to which you are subscribed (I believe there are defaults as well), just to get to your most recent issues. I spend about 10x more for magazines on Play Newsstand than I do on Play movie rentals & android apps every year. Yet the options for automating downloads, selecting the type/quality of download, verifying library content, etc are amateurish at best. You cannot even read a magazine using Google Chrome in Linux. I also have almost a full year's worth of a subscription that doesn't even show up. When I called support, they stated it was a known issue. No refund and no attempt to fix. $70 down the drain. But yeah, my news feed is so much more important than the household $500/yr on magazine subscriptions.
return0 9y ago
Great, what i asked for: think for me before I do.
rubyn00bie 9y ago
This seems like the true reason, or end game, for AMP. It's a way to control the presentation and wall people in to prevent them from leaving Google. I hate AMP and I'm pretty sure I'd hate this if I still used Google much. Especially if it's driven solely by algorithms and AI.
tyingq 9y ago
Betting clicking on any lands you on a Google AMP cached page too. So they can control the page, add the AMP banner, carousel widget, etc.
darren_ 9y ago
The bit about adding it to the website seems like a misinterpretation/over-extrapolation of something said in a briefing about it, specifically that the news feed would be brought to mobile web browsers 'in some form' (see quotes below). That's pretty different from "the feed is definitely being attached to google.com", and also seems to entirely exclude the idea of it showing up on desktop google.com as well. (disclaimer: I work at google, but I know nothing much about this in particular) Fortune: > "In addition to putting Google Feed on mobile apps, the company is looking at attaching it to web browsers in some form, Shashi Thakur, a second Google vice president for engineering, said during the briefing." http://fortune.com/2017/07/19/google-feed-compete-facebook-newsfeed/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/19/google-feed-compete-facebook-n... Indian Express: "The company is looking to bring it to mobile web browsers, although it didn’t say when. “It should have roughly the same behavior” as a news feed, Thakur said." http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/google-scraps-sparse-search-page-for-full-fledged-news-feed-on-mobile-app-4759171/ http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techno...
intoverflow2 9y ago
This must mean that Yahoo and the other search engines that followed the "portal" design pattern which Google was a welcome alternative to are so far in the past that they're about to sleepwalk into the same design mistakes. Looks like Duckduckgo has an opening, don't waste it.
rawTruthHurts 9y ago
Isn't this going back to 1999?
BorisMelnik 9y ago
I've been using Google Home / Android version of this for a year or so now, and I have to say I really enjoy it. NOt sure if I will also enjoy the desktop version, but the app is truly intuitive. It shows me not just "news" but stuff like -amazon price udpates on products I like -random forum comments -HN threads trending -and of course, news type news either way I don't ;like a cluttered feed but I do have my eye on this
crispytx 9y ago
What a horrible idea. Their original user interface consisting of a logo, a search bar, and two buttons is iconic and made up a great deal of what set google apart from its competitors. I know the first time I used Google in the late 90's, the thing I noticed was the user interface. I was a middle school kid then and knew nothing of PageRank. The reason I kept going back to google was their UI.
parrellel 9y ago
Well, I believe it really is time someone came up with a good replacement for Google.
velobro 9y ago
The whole home page news feed thing is exactly why my father chooses to use Bing and I'm sure he's not the only one in that boat. Looks like Google has realized this.
mikeleeorg 9y ago
If anyone has the Pocket browser extension installed, they'll notice that Pocket automatically adds some featured (and maybe personalized?) stories to a new blank Google Chrome web page, right below the search field. I used to think this was obnoxious. Then I started clicking on the articles. Now, I like this feature. It surfaces articles that I otherwise might have missed. So I could see this working with Google, if they do it right. And perhaps they should offer a way to turn it off for users who prefer a simple UI.

167 points by codefined 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Google's blog post talks about introducing the newsfeed to the Google app, but I don't see any mention of Google.com: https://www.blog.google/products/search/feed-your-need-know/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/feed-your-need-know/ Anyone know where the BBC found this confirmation?

quarterbox 9y ago
I think they weren't being precise and just meant how the app will look, which some people might equate with google.com itself. I don't see any reason to believe it would affect the site.
- yohui 9y ago
  Perhaps the BBC spoke to someone at Google who said the news feed would be available via the web – à la https://news.google.com https://news.google.com or https://newsstand.google.com/ https://newsstand.google.com/ – which the reporter misunderstood to mean Google.com itself would display the news feed? It just seems anomalous that such a great change would be announced with so little fanfare (a single sentence in the article). I need to see confirmation before I believe it.
  - yohui 9y ago
    Update: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/google-denies-claims-of-a-desktop-google-com-revamp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/google-denies-claims...
azinman2 9y ago
The iPhone app has it already.
- notatoad 9y ago
  as does the android app - has for a long time. The only announcement here seems to be that they're putting some marketing behind it and calling it a capital-P Product, instead of just being a feature of the app. If they're actually adding it to Google.com that's newsworthy, but i think that's just the BBC misinterpreting something.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Really, Google, all I want is my search-oriented "plus" operator back, and for you to unfuck search. I would have bought into the other Plus, your social network, but you fucked over your base product (search) during its launch, and then went all "real names" et al. on us.

empressplay 9y ago
If you click on Tools and then change "All Results" to "Verbatim", then it behaves a bit more like it used to
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  I can't find this on Google.com - is it just in the App ?
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    From the search-results page, there's a "Tools" button which exposes a bar containing "Any Time, All Results". Click "All Results" and it exposes "Verbatim" as another choice. There might be a more-permanent way to set it if you are logged-in, but I don't usually do that for Google for privacy reasons.
    - Jaruzel 9y ago
      Aha. thank you. It would seem the magic is: &tbs=li:1 On the URL. As I use a custom search page as my home page, I shall alter it accordingly.

to_bpr 9y ago

>The feed will include news stories from a variety of publishers, to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, where people follow only content aligned with their pre-existing point of view. >"To provide information from diverse perspectives, news stories may have multiple viewpoints from a variety of sources... and, when available, you'll be able to fact check," the company said in a blog post. I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with how Google, Facebook etc. are now positioning themselves in terms of what news and sources they believe we should and should not consume. If this piece is true and this update isn't confined to the Google app then I think it may be the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Google products.

ehnto 9y ago
They wouldn't be in the position to guide content if it weren't for users submitting that choice to them. I agree with your sentiment and I too am uncomfortable with it, but we the individuals should take responsibility and ownership of our consumption. It sounds like you are preparing to do so, but I don't have high hopes for society at large. I might extrapolate that at some point I would have pinned the blame entirely on Google, and then rattled about how they have a "social responsibility" and perhaps that's still true. But I am seeing that really, we took the spade to dig a flowerbed, and haven't wavered a bit as it's deepened into a grave.
- to_bpr 9y ago
  I share your outlook on the future of society with regards to its relationship of the mass with technology and privacy. If anything the last decade has shown us, it's that the average person will readily sacrifice freedom and privacy for security and convenience at the earliest opportunity and almost entirely without question or protest. With that being said, I've some feeling that the "consent" FB and Google have from its users to essentially bulk collect and analyze their data may largely stem from ignorance as to what is being collected and how it's being used i.e. the relationship between the content one produces in Gmail and the ads that same person receives. That's a tightly coupled, straightforward relationship too. I've no doubt that the average person has zero idea what is involved when Google touts that it can now confidently track an ad being served/viewed online to an in-store, in-person purchase offline. Then again, with the Snowden leaks and similar and the absolutely apathetic (at best) reaction from the public at large, maybe convenience merely trumps all and will forever more.

cartyboi29 9y ago

Lmfao can't wait for the virgin 30 year olds on the site to start crying about this

monochromatic 9y ago

Google's services just get worse and worse these days. Used to be so damn good. Sad.

pesenti 9y ago

20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....

flyingprogram 9y ago
Great startup idea!
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  Someone already did it! https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
  - atupis 9y ago
    Some weird reason duckduckgo usually gives worse search results than google.
    - iagooar 9y ago
      The reason is Google probably has 100x the money, and 1000x the expertise. I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google. I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
      - SkyMarshal 9y ago
        Possibly more data too. AI + more data = more useful results.
    - Insanity 9y ago
      I have been using DDG for a long time now and have never had that problem. Except with images. So I still use google for that.:-)

aphextron 9y ago

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the official endorsement of sites like breitbart.com by the White House, and I don't think there's any going back. It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.

rtpg 9y ago
Let's not forget that standard media diet includes Fox News and One America Network (which has ~15% the viewer count of Fox News). Old media isn't necessarily great at filtering out nonsense. Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.
- headmelted 9y ago
  As a longtime Guardian reader, I'd be careful about implicitly declaring the Guardian as any more "legitimate" than anyone else. Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market. (I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).
  - drizzt396 9y ago
    That recent article about the rebellious self-owned Greek factory was case in point. Great story, but the journalism was lacking significantly.
  - BigJono 9y ago
    Yep, I read the Guardian's Australian edition every now and then and some of their stuff is absolute rubbish. I'd love to know what the go-to center-left news source is over here. So far I haven't found it...

pryelluw 9y ago

Took long enough. The next step will be adding a Google+ integrated commenting system. But why? Attention (which is Google's main product) is now captivated by the social networks. Google must adapt or lose market share. What is interesting is how they have not been able to really break into social. What about Google makes it so difficult for them to do just that?

Jedi72 9y ago
It's very important that people working on things like human social interaction be able to do things like invert binary trees. They only hire the best.

0xbear 9y ago

And it goes without saying that the news sources preferences will reflect those of Google's predominantly liberal top brass.

hyperdunc 9y ago
I suspect you're correct, despite any assurances to the contrary. And any bias might not even be by design but rather just a result of the biases of the people who make the feature.

shadowmint 9y ago

It's hard to believe this is going to happen to google.com Google is, if nothing else, obsessed with metrics; unless they'd A/B/... tested this to death, there is zero chance they'll roll it out to their homepage. I can't believe it, and it's not mentioned anywhere on their blog post. To be fair, most people probably search from the chrome toolbar now, but even so, I imagine at most, we'll see a staged roll out to a cohort to test it.

lugg 9y ago
Most "normal" people I observe either type in google.com, use a separate search box, or click a bookmark that goes to google.com. Rarely do I see them searching using the url box. That's where web addresses go silly!
intoverflow2 9y ago
Being obsessed with metrics is the exact reason something like this would go through. All companies that design to metrics instead of vision always ship the worst UI/UX crimes. This is the ideology we have to thank for things like the lightbox sign up forms that block or lock out content if you try to browse without an account on FB/Pintrest etc. You're assuming the metric Google is designing for is still how fast a user gets what they want off site. What if the metric they're designing for is how long someone spends in the Google ecosystem?
- BorisMelnik 9y ago
  on that note...how on earth is it possibly that the "im feeling lucky" button is still doing something for them?

dabei 9y ago

The title is a bit clickbaity. It's a news feed. I don't see how it's related to Facebook.

rajeshmr 9y ago

Seems like bad news to me! :( However, one could easily start using "startpage.com" or duckduckgo.com with "!google <your search string>" - both deliver results from google!

annon 9y ago

This seems much more like Apple News than Facebook.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

Have we gone back in time? The idea of a newsfeed is ancient, pre-dating the interne. The only difference is that this time around the feed only shows you what you want to see. Scary shit.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

corndoge 9y ago

I had to double check to see if I had woken up from a coma and it was in fact April 1, 2018, but no. What a way to destroy the most iconic webpage in history.

euyyn 9y ago
I would guess non-logged in access would still yield the all-white page?

chartreusek 9y ago

Didn't they try basically this before, then had it fail and discontinue in the form of iGoogle(2005-2013)? The idea of google going back to that is just nuts. At least DuckDuckGo has got the search page concept right.

azinman2 9y ago
This seems to auto-populate which is different, and is far simpler. iGoogle was widget based and relied on you to pick the info sources.
- dx034 9y ago
  But iGoogle still was very popular. It was killed despite being used by many because Google decided everyone should use Google+ from now on.
andygates 9y ago
They definitely discontinued it, but that doesn't mean it failed. What do you think made them kill it? At the time, it felt like textbook Google capriciousness (see Reader, etc).
- fwn 9y ago
  I expected it to be a strategic push towards their more interactive content aggregation feature built into Google+.

septarol 9y ago

Who cares your privacy.

partiallypro 9y ago

I use Bing's news section (on their home page) all the time, syncs with Cortana. I assume this will be similar. I'm sure they will let you hide it, even Bing does that.

roystonvassey 9y ago

Do people even visit google.com anymore? I just type in the address bar of browsers.

zentlim 9y ago

Interesting. On first glance I was thinking the article was pertaining to Google Plus. It was talking about the website after all - "Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage - Google.com". This made it a lot interesting. Google Plus doesn't seem to be making it in our country. But Google Search has been here for a long time. The front end of it didn't change much for as long as I can remember. (The back end though seem to be mutating like a monster.) I wonder how they're planning to target who sees what kind of content. But I think they pretty much have enough data gathered from all the email accounts and search results that everyone has been feeding them. Looking forward to this update and more importantly how people will react to it.

usaphp 9y ago

Who visits google.com anyway? I am pretty sure majority of those users who aren't interested in seeing these news are already using google search via browser address bar. Only those who go to google.com will see these news , and they seem to be an exact type of people who would enjoy such content and spend hours browsing it generating more revenue to google

riffraff 9y ago
I don't, but I like google now on my phone, and occasionally hit news.google. so, if google.com includes those two, I might start to visit it while on desktop.
Andrenid 9y ago
Google.com is the home/start page for a looooot of people.
adamzerner 9y ago
It's the world's most visited website. > Google is known for its sparse homepage, which, though mostly white space, has, according to analytics firm Alexa Internet, become the world's most-visited website.
dyukqu 9y ago
Majority of regular users (who do not care or even know about any kind of online privacy, open web, net neutrality etc.) I interact with go to google.com, write down e.g. "facebook" and then log in! They don't even know they can use url bar for searching (let alone typing xyz.com directly). It makes my blood boil every time I see that. I try to explain, they usually just don't care to listen/understand. Coming from other thread about Firefox marketshare, it's mostly this kind of users that kill the open web and help billion-dollar walled-gardens prosper. There are billions of them.
- mvdwoord 9y ago
  Paraphrasing something else... this is probably what actual hell is like. Having to watch people browse the web in this way. Indefinitely.

handedness 9y ago

Without Marissa Mayer is there really nobody senior enough at Google to successfully fight such a bad idea?

welcomebrand 9y ago

I can't wait for them to add a stories UI so I can see what my friends are searching for while I'm searching.

spookyuser 9y ago

Dear God. I can barely handle the news snippets that have started appearing in Google Now, I'm actually really close to disabling the entire thing because of them. I guess this means they're not going away anytime soon.

verytrivial 9y ago
I disabled them after about a day and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I have about as much respect for news/trivia noise as the ads you hear in call hold music.
- spookyuser 9y ago
  Please tell me how? Is there a way to disable them without disabling google now?
  - verytrivial 9y ago
    Nope! There's no way. Funny, that. (Same goes for Google's new-ish "share location" feature of Maps. Want that? Then you'll have to share and record you location for all apps. And you have to hunt into settings to re-disable it EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's a feature! Basically a Trojan horse for Google's "record everything" business need, but less immediately threatening. A Trojan gnat, perhaps.)

verytrivial 9y ago

Dear Google, my concentration is a valuable resource to me. Please don't fritter it away. (In practical terms, please don't remove the option to disable the trivia feed.)

majewsky 9y ago
Custom style sheet to the rescue.

beambot 9y ago

If only there was a system to create "feeds" of website entries (such as news sites), aggregate them, and then read them at our discretion. Then we could each create our own personal Google homepage. Google could brand such an offering as "Google reader" and "Google personalized homepage"... (For those who don't remember: these both used to be a thing!) </Bitterness>

crowbahr 9y ago
See but that gives you, the consumer, toouch control over what you see. They don't want it to be your choice.
- chrischen 9y ago
  Yea if they gave you the choice not screw yourself over, then you wouldn't be able to get screwed over by Google </sarcasm>
- euyyn 9y ago
  Google Reader was made open source, to be fair, and has plenty of replacements too.
crispytx 9y ago
I think that's sort of what RSS was going for, but it doesn't seem to have really taken off. Maybe we need an RSS 2.0.
- beambot 9y ago
  RSS did take off... Google released their free reader, which grabbed (probably) 80% market share with 1-2 engineers maintaining it. Then it was killed (to the VERY loud protestations of the internet) for no apparent reason.

orbitingpluto 9y ago

What I want to know about Google's news feed priorities is what possessed them to think it's a good idea to completely overtake the Play Newsstand app? To access a magazine subscription, you must open Play Newsstand, click on the Library icon now relocated to the bottom (as they've culled all options from the hamburger menu), then scroll down every single news feed source to which you are subscribed (I believe there are defaults as well), just to get to your most recent issues. I spend about 10x more for magazines on Play Newsstand than I do on Play movie rentals & android apps every year. Yet the options for automating downloads, selecting the type/quality of download, verifying library content, etc are amateurish at best. You cannot even read a magazine using Google Chrome in Linux. I also have almost a full year's worth of a subscription that doesn't even show up. When I called support, they stated it was a known issue. No refund and no attempt to fix. $70 down the drain. But yeah, my news feed is so much more important than the household $500/yr on magazine subscriptions.

return0 9y ago

Great, what i asked for: think for me before I do.

rubyn00bie 9y ago

This seems like the true reason, or end game, for AMP. It's a way to control the presentation and wall people in to prevent them from leaving Google. I hate AMP and I'm pretty sure I'd hate this if I still used Google much. Especially if it's driven solely by algorithms and AI.

tyingq 9y ago

Betting clicking on any lands you on a Google AMP cached page too. So they can control the page, add the AMP banner, carousel widget, etc.

darren_ 9y ago

The bit about adding it to the website seems like a misinterpretation/over-extrapolation of something said in a briefing about it, specifically that the news feed would be brought to mobile web browsers 'in some form' (see quotes below). That's pretty different from "the feed is definitely being attached to google.com", and also seems to entirely exclude the idea of it showing up on desktop google.com as well. (disclaimer: I work at google, but I know nothing much about this in particular) Fortune: > "In addition to putting Google Feed on mobile apps, the company is looking at attaching it to web browsers in some form, Shashi Thakur, a second Google vice president for engineering, said during the briefing." http://fortune.com/2017/07/19/google-feed-compete-facebook-newsfeed/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/19/google-feed-compete-facebook-n... Indian Express: "The company is looking to bring it to mobile web browsers, although it didn’t say when. “It should have roughly the same behavior” as a news feed, Thakur said." http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/google-scraps-sparse-search-page-for-full-fledged-news-feed-on-mobile-app-4759171/ http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techno...

intoverflow2 9y ago

This must mean that Yahoo and the other search engines that followed the "portal" design pattern which Google was a welcome alternative to are so far in the past that they're about to sleepwalk into the same design mistakes. Looks like Duckduckgo has an opening, don't waste it.

rawTruthHurts 9y ago

Isn't this going back to 1999?

BorisMelnik 9y ago

I've been using Google Home / Android version of this for a year or so now, and I have to say I really enjoy it. NOt sure if I will also enjoy the desktop version, but the app is truly intuitive. It shows me not just "news" but stuff like -amazon price udpates on products I like -random forum comments -HN threads trending -and of course, news type news either way I don't ;like a cluttered feed but I do have my eye on this

crispytx 9y ago

What a horrible idea. Their original user interface consisting of a logo, a search bar, and two buttons is iconic and made up a great deal of what set google apart from its competitors. I know the first time I used Google in the late 90's, the thing I noticed was the user interface. I was a middle school kid then and knew nothing of PageRank. The reason I kept going back to google was their UI.

parrellel 9y ago

Well, I believe it really is time someone came up with a good replacement for Google.

velobro 9y ago

The whole home page news feed thing is exactly why my father chooses to use Bing and I'm sure he's not the only one in that boat. Looks like Google has realized this.

mikeleeorg 9y ago

If anyone has the Pocket browser extension installed, they'll notice that Pocket automatically adds some featured (and maybe personalized?) stories to a new blank Google Chrome web page, right below the search field. I used to think this was obnoxious. Then I started clicking on the articles. Now, I like this feature. It surfaces articles that I otherwise might have missed. So I could see this working with Google, if they do it right. And perhaps they should offer a way to turn it off for users who prefer a simple UI.