25 ms·

Google News to be revamped, incorporate YouTube videos and magazines

58 points by Jaruzel 9y ago

blklivesmatter 9y ago
Nobody talk google bosses bilderberg meetings, why HN ? How much data they stole, sold harvested from your privacy ? HN too bias for Google, facebook and twitter ??
jbafk 9y ago
I hope the EU has something to say about this.
wscott 9y ago
I hope I can opt out of video. It is bad enough that most the news sites will autoplay videos when you go there. Hmmm, they add code to Chrome to avoid those videos and now they are going to add their own.
- ddorian43 9y ago
  Then there is twitter/instagram that pauses/mutes the video when you change the tab...
- johnloeber 9y ago
  In Chrome and Firefox, you can turn off video autoplay at the browser level. It’s a config option.
chmars 9y ago
I hope that search options will become available again. With the last revamp, Google removed the option to get all results in chronological order.
- monetus 9y ago
  It really blows my mind how they actively make search worse with things like that.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Its cooperate politics panicking due to the failing of some cobbled together success metric. One of the holy cash cows of the company is inserted into the new product using all the previously gained knowledge- on how to herd holy cows, usually damaging the new product beyond repair. It fails, the ruin is abandoned and sold off as scrap, and this top down approach to product development is taken as further evidence that the internal innovation culture is deteriorating. Instead, some external company doing a "superficial similar feature" is bought to overcome the perceived deficit. This fails to integrate due to cooperate cultural clashes and architectural differences. Who would have thought that something like google could be turned into another flailing behemoth, whose management is incapable of seeing potential anywhere besides its core product and the glorious past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC Remember microsofts attempts to cram Windows into everything? Which ironically turned around only after, anything (platform cellphone) was allowed to adapt the holy cash cow to its needs. Lets take something like Googles AR-Core. If it would show great potential, it will be honored to integrate search into it. And how will that happen? Like search always happened. As a clumsy text-entry or as voice search. First approach deteriorates the platform (there is no useful keyboard)- second adds no additional value but at least would work. Truth is, to be successful the core cash cow ("search") would have to adapt to the needs of the new platform. Imagine a NN-net guessing correctly- after you gestured a question mark - not only which trackable you pointed towards, but what the context was and deliver search results situation aware results and suggestions. Such innovation would force changes upon search- and thus surely would face fierce resistance. Edit: I apologize for the previous version to any readers. I should stop coding and commenting parallel.
    - fragsworth 9y ago
      You really need to use grammar/spelling correction. Your text is incredibly frustrating to read.
djflutt3rshy 9y ago
One of the reasons I quit using Google News is the prevalence of "articles" in the Sci/Tech and Health sections giving me all the latest news about how the globe-alists are keeping Planet Nibiru a secret, and why doctors hate this ONE single trick to cure cancer. Unless it's very carefully curated, adding YouTube videos to the mix seems like it'd aggravate this problem.
- ebbv 9y ago
  Exactly why I stopped using google news. Garbage sites started getting thier garbage articles into my feed constantly and it was an annoying battle to keep them out. Seems obvious and easy to fix, but in true google fashion they will probably only make it worse.
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    > Seems obvious and easy to fix Is it?
    - abenedic 9y ago
      There is usually a pattern used by clickbait articles, and psuedoscientific ones tend to use unusual words(e.g. quantum, toxin, etc.) far more regularly. Also the entire site tends to be bad, so google could index a list of poor quality news sites. Isn't that a little bit their job for ranking sites?
      - danmaz74 9y ago
        It is their job, but, looking at what happens with SEO - the never ending cat-and-mouse game where "black hats" always adapt to the new countermeasures Google puts in place - I wouldn't say it's all that easy :)
    - ebbv 9y ago
      Yeah, it is. Give people better interfaces for controlling the sources. Set a higher bar for quality before even letting a site put their articles up. It wasn’t a problem on Google News for years and it’s because it didn’t pull articles from those sites. A super easy solution is just dump all those newer contributing sites. Saying that Google has problems with spammers in search results too isn’t proof that the problem is hard to solve, because it used to be solved pretty well in both cases. It’s proof that Google has de-prioritized solving it.
jgh 9y ago
Well I’m not sure how they can make it worse than they already have but I’m ready to be surprised.
AJ007 9y ago
This could be a great opportunity for another news site, like when they fucked up Google Finance https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,Yahoo%20finance https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,...
- vntok 9y ago
  Interesting. What did they do to fuck it up?
  - fragsworth 9y ago
    They removed all of the most useful and important features and dumbed it down significantly. It had a resizable graph, with the ability to quickly compare two or more ticker symbols, and news icons right on the graph that showed significant events for the company. It also had a great customizable table to manage your own portfolio, and a ton of data that mostly seems to be missing now. It was the best free finance tool available in the world, by far. Now it's just another piece of garbage like any random finance website.
    - kbrosnan 9y ago
      Note that all the great features were implemented in Flash. The cost of documenting the behaviors and building a team to reimplement was deemed non-essential.
      - EpicEng 9y ago
        >all the great features... deemed non-essential. Sounds like a winning strategy.
        kbrosnan 9y ago
        Google's actions made it clear that Google Finance has been an unowned or skeleton project for several years. Google never made a Google Finance app for Android. Just because there is a vocal audience that likes the old product does not mean that reimplementing the flash features is a good use of resources.
amorphid 9y ago
When I want to search Google for news, I do a regular seearch, and then click over to the news link, which displays the results in a much easier to consume formant that the regular Google News UI.
shadowtree 9y ago
What is going on at the Google design team? The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations. Finance, Calendar, Mail ... all getting new UIs, and all of them are worse. Giant whitespace, low information density, a sluggish webapp feel,...just what is going on? The new GMail struggles to keep up with clicks in any browser - while the previous version was snappy. How on earth is this possible?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations Quality is subjective and perhaps they are improving for a target audience that is not you.
  - hedora 9y ago
    UI quality is not subjective; decades of research have gone into quantifying user interface quality, and also into proving that the resulting metrics reflect reality. Dismissing this entire field of work is like saying “Structural integrity is subjective. Bridges gotta fall eventually, and geology is hard, so why bother?”
    - abadaba 9y ago
      But quality criteria is subjective on an individual basis. Individuals place varying weights on aspects of a user interface. Some prefer speed over aesthetic, some prefer whitespace over information density, etc. The quality criteria among one demographic may differ from the quality criteria among another. So I think it’s safe to say that a company can optimize its UI quality for a certain demographic, and that demographic may not include certain individual users.
- hedora 9y ago
  Ignoring the aesthetics, they’re breaking basic workflows. For instance, try rejecting a calendar invite with a response. I guarantee you’ll screw it up the first time. Something similar happened with windows phone. Version 8’s UI was painstakingly optimized to minimize the number of taps to get anything done, and all the controls were at the bottom of the screen. (I guess market research showed that people use fingers to control their smartphones, and not some other appendage.) In 8.1, they increased the number of taps for most interactions. For instance, in 8.0, you opened maps, typed your destination and pressed enter. It popped up an interstital screen with options that timed out after 5ish seconds of no interaction, and then started navigating. This was infuriating, but still well beyond the current state of the art. If I remember right, in 8.1, you had to wait for networking, click through the screen, wait again, and click OK, just like on current iOS (except that the controls on iOS can’t be used one handed, so you get to have zero hands on the wheel instead of one). Also, even in the broken revamp, it was obvious what was tappable, and what was not. Google has taken regression of basic workflows to a new level with their new ui revamp. For instance: Clicking “no” in a calendar invite brings you to a confusing form with no useful information and a bajillion user interface elements. You need to click a low contrast text box that says “invite guests / tldr” to type a repsonse, and then click a button. Of course, there is no visual indication that the “invite guests...” text is an editable text box until you click it. Typing your response and clicking no doesn’t actually do anything until you click the red button in the top left of the screen. The only way I’ve found to discover this is to attempt to close the calendar UI. I have never attempted to use the new calendar UI workflow on a phone. I suspect it is even worse. The fact that Google is dysfunctional enough to ship things like this boggles the mind. Even Apple, which is supposed to be good at this stuff, is years behind defunct competitors in easily quantifiable, obvious metrics.
Bahamut 9y ago
The last thing I want when I browse news is for video to be incorporated. It's already bad enough seeing video only articles on Google News on occasion. This will probably push me to switching to Apple News for mobile.
dragonwriter 9y ago
This would be tolerable if there was a preference to disable all video content, but otherwise this is going to be a strong push for me to find a different aggregator: when I go to Google News I'm looking specifically for text-base news 100% of the time; video is a poor medium for information and an excellent one for emotional manipulation.
schwank 9y ago
I was already unhappy with Amp and the last redesign. I have used GNews more than most other sites in the past but it's already gotten pretty bad. Add in YouTube and I'm done. Really could use a new aggregator... Will have to check out the newstral.com site linked in another post here. Any other options?

58 points by Jaruzel 9y ago

Nobody talk google bosses bilderberg meetings, why HN ? How much data they stole, sold harvested from your privacy ? HN too bias for Google, facebook and twitter ??

jbafk 9y ago

I hope the EU has something to say about this.

wscott 9y ago

I hope I can opt out of video. It is bad enough that most the news sites will autoplay videos when you go there. Hmmm, they add code to Chrome to avoid those videos and now they are going to add their own.

ddorian43 9y ago
Then there is twitter/instagram that pauses/mutes the video when you change the tab...
johnloeber 9y ago
In Chrome and Firefox, you can turn off video autoplay at the browser level. It’s a config option.

chmars 9y ago

I hope that search options will become available again. With the last revamp, Google removed the option to get all results in chronological order.

monetus 9y ago
It really blows my mind how they actively make search worse with things like that.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  Its cooperate politics panicking due to the failing of some cobbled together success metric. One of the holy cash cows of the company is inserted into the new product using all the previously gained knowledge- on how to herd holy cows, usually damaging the new product beyond repair. It fails, the ruin is abandoned and sold off as scrap, and this top down approach to product development is taken as further evidence that the internal innovation culture is deteriorating. Instead, some external company doing a "superficial similar feature" is bought to overcome the perceived deficit. This fails to integrate due to cooperate cultural clashes and architectural differences. Who would have thought that something like google could be turned into another flailing behemoth, whose management is incapable of seeing potential anywhere besides its core product and the glorious past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC Remember microsofts attempts to cram Windows into everything? Which ironically turned around only after, anything (platform cellphone) was allowed to adapt the holy cash cow to its needs. Lets take something like Googles AR-Core. If it would show great potential, it will be honored to integrate search into it. And how will that happen? Like search always happened. As a clumsy text-entry or as voice search. First approach deteriorates the platform (there is no useful keyboard)- second adds no additional value but at least would work. Truth is, to be successful the core cash cow ("search") would have to adapt to the needs of the new platform. Imagine a NN-net guessing correctly- after you gestured a question mark - not only which trackable you pointed towards, but what the context was and deliver search results situation aware results and suggestions. Such innovation would force changes upon search- and thus surely would face fierce resistance. Edit: I apologize for the previous version to any readers. I should stop coding and commenting parallel.
  - fragsworth 9y ago
    You really need to use grammar/spelling correction. Your text is incredibly frustrating to read.

djflutt3rshy 9y ago

One of the reasons I quit using Google News is the prevalence of "articles" in the Sci/Tech and Health sections giving me all the latest news about how the globe-alists are keeping Planet Nibiru a secret, and why doctors hate this ONE single trick to cure cancer. Unless it's very carefully curated, adding YouTube videos to the mix seems like it'd aggravate this problem.

ebbv 9y ago
Exactly why I stopped using google news. Garbage sites started getting thier garbage articles into my feed constantly and it was an annoying battle to keep them out. Seems obvious and easy to fix, but in true google fashion they will probably only make it worse.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  > Seems obvious and easy to fix Is it?
  - abenedic 9y ago
    There is usually a pattern used by clickbait articles, and psuedoscientific ones tend to use unusual words(e.g. quantum, toxin, etc.) far more regularly. Also the entire site tends to be bad, so google could index a list of poor quality news sites. Isn't that a little bit their job for ranking sites?
    - danmaz74 9y ago
      It is their job, but, looking at what happens with SEO - the never ending cat-and-mouse game where "black hats" always adapt to the new countermeasures Google puts in place - I wouldn't say it's all that easy :)
  - ebbv 9y ago
    Yeah, it is. Give people better interfaces for controlling the sources. Set a higher bar for quality before even letting a site put their articles up. It wasn’t a problem on Google News for years and it’s because it didn’t pull articles from those sites. A super easy solution is just dump all those newer contributing sites. Saying that Google has problems with spammers in search results too isn’t proof that the problem is hard to solve, because it used to be solved pretty well in both cases. It’s proof that Google has de-prioritized solving it.

jgh 9y ago

Well I’m not sure how they can make it worse than they already have but I’m ready to be surprised.

AJ007 9y ago

This could be a great opportunity for another news site, like when they fucked up Google Finance https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,Yahoo%20finance https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,...

vntok 9y ago
Interesting. What did they do to fuck it up?
- fragsworth 9y ago
  They removed all of the most useful and important features and dumbed it down significantly. It had a resizable graph, with the ability to quickly compare two or more ticker symbols, and news icons right on the graph that showed significant events for the company. It also had a great customizable table to manage your own portfolio, and a ton of data that mostly seems to be missing now. It was the best free finance tool available in the world, by far. Now it's just another piece of garbage like any random finance website.
  - kbrosnan 9y ago
    Note that all the great features were implemented in Flash. The cost of documenting the behaviors and building a team to reimplement was deemed non-essential.
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      >all the great features... deemed non-essential. Sounds like a winning strategy.
      - kbrosnan 9y ago
        Google's actions made it clear that Google Finance has been an unowned or skeleton project for several years. Google never made a Google Finance app for Android. Just because there is a vocal audience that likes the old product does not mean that reimplementing the flash features is a good use of resources.

amorphid 9y ago

When I want to search Google for news, I do a regular seearch, and then click over to the news link, which displays the results in a much easier to consume formant that the regular Google News UI.

shadowtree 9y ago

What is going on at the Google design team? The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations. Finance, Calendar, Mail ... all getting new UIs, and all of them are worse. Giant whitespace, low information density, a sluggish webapp feel,...just what is going on? The new GMail struggles to keep up with clicks in any browser - while the previous version was snappy. How on earth is this possible?

dragonwriter 9y ago
> The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations Quality is subjective and perhaps they are improving for a target audience that is not you.
- hedora 9y ago
  UI quality is not subjective; decades of research have gone into quantifying user interface quality, and also into proving that the resulting metrics reflect reality. Dismissing this entire field of work is like saying “Structural integrity is subjective. Bridges gotta fall eventually, and geology is hard, so why bother?”
  - abadaba 9y ago
    But quality criteria is subjective on an individual basis. Individuals place varying weights on aspects of a user interface. Some prefer speed over aesthetic, some prefer whitespace over information density, etc. The quality criteria among one demographic may differ from the quality criteria among another. So I think it’s safe to say that a company can optimize its UI quality for a certain demographic, and that demographic may not include certain individual users.
hedora 9y ago
Ignoring the aesthetics, they’re breaking basic workflows. For instance, try rejecting a calendar invite with a response. I guarantee you’ll screw it up the first time. Something similar happened with windows phone. Version 8’s UI was painstakingly optimized to minimize the number of taps to get anything done, and all the controls were at the bottom of the screen. (I guess market research showed that people use fingers to control their smartphones, and not some other appendage.) In 8.1, they increased the number of taps for most interactions. For instance, in 8.0, you opened maps, typed your destination and pressed enter. It popped up an interstital screen with options that timed out after 5ish seconds of no interaction, and then started navigating. This was infuriating, but still well beyond the current state of the art. If I remember right, in 8.1, you had to wait for networking, click through the screen, wait again, and click OK, just like on current iOS (except that the controls on iOS can’t be used one handed, so you get to have zero hands on the wheel instead of one). Also, even in the broken revamp, it was obvious what was tappable, and what was not. Google has taken regression of basic workflows to a new level with their new ui revamp. For instance: Clicking “no” in a calendar invite brings you to a confusing form with no useful information and a bajillion user interface elements. You need to click a low contrast text box that says “invite guests / tldr” to type a repsonse, and then click a button. Of course, there is no visual indication that the “invite guests...” text is an editable text box until you click it. Typing your response and clicking no doesn’t actually do anything until you click the red button in the top left of the screen. The only way I’ve found to discover this is to attempt to close the calendar UI. I have never attempted to use the new calendar UI workflow on a phone. I suspect it is even worse. The fact that Google is dysfunctional enough to ship things like this boggles the mind. Even Apple, which is supposed to be good at this stuff, is years behind defunct competitors in easily quantifiable, obvious metrics.

Bahamut 9y ago

The last thing I want when I browse news is for video to be incorporated. It's already bad enough seeing video only articles on Google News on occasion. This will probably push me to switching to Apple News for mobile.

dragonwriter 9y ago

This would be tolerable if there was a preference to disable all video content, but otherwise this is going to be a strong push for me to find a different aggregator: when I go to Google News I'm looking specifically for text-base news 100% of the time; video is a poor medium for information and an excellent one for emotional manipulation.

schwank 9y ago

I was already unhappy with Amp and the last redesign. I have used GNews more than most other sites in the past but it's already gotten pretty bad. Add in YouTube and I'm done. Really could use a new aggregator... Will have to check out the newstral.com site linked in another post here. Any other options?