Are You Ogling Google News?

heytal asks: "Yes, It's old news, and you all have been to Google News at least once. And yes, it crawls Slashdot and considers it as one of the news sources too ;-).This article is an interesting article on how things work, and how Google News would change the industry. What I want to ask the Slashdot users is their experience with Google News, how much they use it, and how has it changed their news surfing habbits?"

Comments

It's great for my purpose

[Syncdata]

For a few years now I've been copying the text of articles into a .txt files, and saving it in a news database, creating my own personal mini-lexis nexus for research purposes, as you never know when a link is going to go dead.
I don't actually read the stories half the time, just copy the text for later searches. A random smattering of recent stories is just what the doctor ordered half the time, as with most things google, the results of the news searches are, for the most part, highly relevant. Yahoo's searches through AP/reuters never quite did it for me, so it's a welcome edition to my news gathering arsenal.

Ongoing experiment

[babbage]

Honestly, I'd been using news.google.com as my main headlines page for several months now, and was surprised to find, when I woke up & checked my regular morning pages the other day, that the layout had been made much more complicated (because, of course, the site had gone public).

The previous layout was a whole lot simpler, just a simple list of categories, top stories within each, and four or five links to that story from different sources. One nice touch was that the link for each story was the headline used for it, which was nice because you could tell at a glance who was just repeating a wire feed and who really had something worthwhile -- and sometimes you could get nicely contrasting stories (like, say, the same event in Kashmir as described by both Indian & Pakistani news sources). The new, more complex & busy layout doesn't allow them to do this anymore, which IMO is a change for the worse.

AS for the new layout, I dunno. It has much higher information density, which the Edward Tufte fan in me thinks is a very good thing. But it's a very busy layout, and so a bit overwhelming to me. I'm finding that I haven't spent as much time on the new version as I was before on the old one, and I'm not checking it as often either -- maybe just a cursory glance once or twice a day, as opposed to a more careful skim several times a day before. Compared to the sparse layouts that Google ordinarily uses, a design this heavy feels very jarring to me, where on another site I probably wouldn't care. Hopefully I'll get over this.

Here's an interesting angle though, from the article the original submitter noted:

Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information.

Why can't Slashdot come up with such an arrangment? The NY TImes is one of the best news sources on the 'net, and I'm sure their staff has to have at least some Slashdot fans. The constant whining disclaimers about having to register -- and the even more bizarre constant opposition to the very idea -- could all be short-circuited if the two sites could enter into a similar arrangement. Why has this never happened? Lack of imagination, or is one side or the other just uninterested? Whatever the obstacle has been, I'd be happy if we could just get over it and set up some kind of arrangement.

Google has a clue

[Raetsel]

That's why I go there -- and have for a long time. Google is what CNN used to be... for me, at least.

The best part of it is that the content comes from a much more diverse set of sources than I'd ever be willing to surf on my own. I'd like to see a full list of the sites they're crawling, but I've been happy with their results so far.

• CNN has become progressively worse. It used to be a large page of stories, and I could find out what was going on in the world in a single page load. Now things are down to (something like) two links per catgory, and you have to dig to find your news.

• MSNBC has stuck with their layout (to their credit), but there's all those menues (or interstitial ads) to deal with -- ick.

• Salon is a giant editorial page, not news. I'm not even going to comment on their in-your-face ads (oops, I just did...)

• Fox News, ABC, USA Today -- I never had any desire to read their sites for some reason.

• Newspaper sites are often too regional (local papers), or require registration (NY Times, Washington Post), so I just didn't read 'em. They'll learn eventually that registration = less readership = less banner ad revenue. Give 'em time, the clue will come.

• NPR is nice, but usually rather thin on the news. I go there to stream audio, not read stories.

The only thing that would make Google News better would be a "Fringe" category -- but I get my weekly dose of that at News of the Weird.

Nothing new here...

[minesweeper]

This partner arrangement has already been available for a while through AltaVista--not that anyone uses that search engine for anything, mind you. Take a look here. You can get to the NYT articles at the top without registering because of the PARTNER=ALTAVISTA1 at the end of the URL (and some of the garbage before it).

Of course no one really new about this because no one uses AltaVista anymore (at least not their news area). The only reason I knew about it was because Matt Drudge occasionally uses links from there on his page.

And, I guess with Google News you can get any NYT article without registering.