Slashdot Mirror
Google Adds News Personalization
downbad writes "ZDNet is reporting that the Google News home page is now customizable, allowing you to add or delete main news categories (such as business, sports and so on), as well as increasing or decreasing the number of headlines within a section. They've also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you."
Being that I'm a mobile web user most of the time I really appreciate the addition of text only news.google.com. It's not that the page didn't load fast enough as it was but the text only version is left justified and is rendered a lot better than it normally is.
;)
While you can modify the layout to left justify almost everything now it still doesn't remove the "customize this page" box and a couple of stories (from Top Stories) on the right side. Oh well it's still in beta
it automatically filters ads from search results, or at least lets me do it easily.
Would slashdot have reported this if it was Yahoo (or something else) which did this instead of Google?
cos they is reportin'
I think it's great. I'm a Canadian, currently in Chile, and in preparations for a move to Mexico. I am interested in US News, Canadian News, Mexican News, and International News. I could care less about Sports, Entertainment, and Health News, so I get rid of them. This is even better than workspaces for me.
Good work google.
I'd love to see stories that should be true.
/ Courage!
I created a custom section that searches for movies. What has everyone else added?
What's exactly the news here?
Yahoo's been doing this for years.
Ah, I forgot, it's Google. Anything as much as a difference in the atmospheric pressure around the Google campus makes the front page on slashdot.
A hungry bear does not dance!
No because it wouldn't be news, sinc eyou have been able to do this at http://my.yahoo.com for going on 3 years now. As well, My Yahoo! leys you add RSS feeds... Google doesn't (although they let you add custom search feeds, which is different).
Porn.
News, Maps, etc. It certainly appears that Google is poising themselves to become a one-stop internet site.
However, they won't be able to do so without becoming an ISP. So the question is, where and when will Google break into the ISP market so they can capture a gauranteed customer base to compete with Yahoo and MSN?
Is there a likely company for Google to partner with?
And the franchise. Two birds, one stone!
I hope i'm not the only one who want a such featuree on Slashdot too. Wouldn't that feature be quite useful here?
I really don't like the images popping up on certain searches on the main page now. The new functionality really takes away from the clean, minimalist Google feel. At least make it an option to disable it.
I mean, the US News page still has soccer and rugby stories instead of the ethnocentric stuff so many of US care about.
I know this redundant, but seriously MSN and Yahoo have had this since the late 90s. Google news's popularity despite having this functionality should have been the story.
Why is it "news" when Google do another "me too" service?
I mean, let's face it. Yahoo, Reteurs and many others have been doing this sort of thing for years now.
Why is it suddenly news that Google have caught up?
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
... news for parrots!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Google Switches to Slashcode, Hostile Takeover of Slashdot In Planning Stages ;)
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Wow, Google finally relased a product/update that works on the Opera browser. It took a long time for Google: Suggest, Maps, etc. to work properly on Opera.
Kudos to Google.
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
I had just been thinking yesterday that I wish I still had my "What a Wonderful World" news page. I had a service at the time which let me build a page using a set of keywords, so I made one with "genocide" "death squad" "ethnic cleansing" and on and on. It was a great dose of perspective.
The Google thing seems to only let you set up one list of keywords, all of which must all appear in the article, however. sigh... that will not do
I've been able to do this for years with MSN.com. The latest incarnation of this site allows me to not only customize the home page, I can also add specialized content pages. In addition to my general home page which includes traffic reports, weather, headline news, and Slate editorials amongst other things, I have pages for more in-depth coverage of local and national news, sports, a comics page, and a movie listing and reviews page. MSN.com has content from hundreds of sources from content providers like CNET, eBay, Slate, NY Times, MSNBC, and quite a few others. While the page works better in IE on Windows, it still works in Firefox sans some of the more elaborate customization features such as resizable columns and dragging content around to reorder it on the page.
"They've also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you." -- Why not just use RSS?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
New, from Google!
Tired of unfiltered news from the democratic infodels of the world cluttering the mindset of your nation's population? Worry no more!
With only a few clicks of the mouse, you can customize the news categories, topics, outlets and reporters that you wish to be provided to your nation. Even better, use our genius inline search and replace system that lets you manipulate simple regexes to substitute chosen phrases with your own!
Just another service from your friends at Google!
(Well, it's an idea...!)
I honestly believe google is doing amazing things with internet based UIs, but this one leaves a lot to be desired. Its not very intuitive and I find it kind of hard to use. Its not nearly as elegant as gMail or as easy to use as Maps. I wonder why this one seems to be a shotty hack.
Sometimes I wish computers were less friendly.
"They've also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you."
Can you say "Targeted advertising"?
Google crawled Linus's webpage today!
You can also share your preferences with others, because Google will show you a URL which will generate your selected view. At bottom of the page, hit 'Share your customized news with a friend'.
Presumably, the code provided in the URL is a reference to a great big lookup table that they keep with everybody's preferences (custom search terms, layout etc). I have set up lots of custom search terms, and the URL is certainly not long enough to contain them all.
Candygram for Mongo!
I read the headline as Google Adds News Penetration...
This is okay, but I'd rather see Google do what Google does best -- that is, break new ground and not just re-package what other portals have been doing for years. Call me nuts, but I would have expected more of an "oh cool" factor coming out of Google on this.
You see the look on my face, and yet you keep talking.
Not too many moons past, I suggested that Google implement "Personal Home News Pages" where a user could define topics in which they are interested. It would provide news "tuned" to the indidual.
This seems to be something similar. It is good to see good ideas being implemented.
(I'm merely glad to help Google respond to user needs.)
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
This reminds me of little tidbit from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Because "in the future" all the common people got high targeted newspapers containing stories that they would like and it was a sign of status to actually read the normal full New York Times rather then to only get the articles it knows you are interested in. Kinda like /. already. Those who read only /. eventually think that everyone reads /. and cares about issues that are on /.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I browse on a mobile phone, and its screen is teeny tiny (think 128x128 pixels). Google is clever enough to sniff the user-agent and provide a small, 5-result version for me, which I think is rather nice of it.
It's a shame this only works for web searching, not Groups or News. News returns a file too big error, even with the text-only version you mentioned. Is there a way to get a mini-version of the news site as well?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
"Customized news requires you to have both Javascript and cookies turned on."
Hence, they can track what you read.
Actually they had his retarded second and hitherto unknown brother take his place, which is a lot worse than simply killing him...
Does this mean all the
"Google is about to..."
"Google is thinking about..."
"Google is blah-blah..."
stories can now be moved to the Google page and off the Slashdot page?
It would be even better if they can make you RDF feed based on your customized headline. I did manual reloads in my webbrowser last century..
I hope they don't make the news page a standard.
Maybe I'm pulling BS out of my ear here but does anybody know if this kind of personalization is being used to "sort" search results to personalize them as well?
I mean, Google (or MSN, Yahoo or whoever does this sort of thing) should be able to find out some "personal preferences" of people depending on how they sort their news website, what they filter out and so on.
Even worse, are they using this to personalize Google Ads?
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
For all those people who are saying that this is being done already by MSN and Yahoo, Google has definitely better interface for customizing options. Drag and drop sections, ability to switch on and off verbosity are pluses IMO. Plus it is certainly snappier than either Yahoo or MSN
"I could care less about Sports...."
The expression is "I could not care less" - if you can care less, then you care some - if you cannot care less, then you don't care at all.
Now, if you want, you can use this expression:
www.eFax.com are spammers
i hate it when search engines say "text version" when in reality its just "less html", look at the google "text" page bullshit
it has images,colours,tables,fonts,css,script, in fact all the things that somebody expecting a "text" doesn't want, its pretty obvious they fail to see the whole point of having a "text" mode
call it "lite html version" but "text version" it certainly aint
yes, it amazing .. Here is an entity, Google, which seeks to gather all the info in the world, to associate it with particular users (gmail, etc) , to store it forever, and to fail to gaurantee privacy!!
Read the 'Privacy ' statement, people!! Yes , they'll keep it sort of private WHILE THEY OWN THE DATABASE!! The COULD have said that no future sale of the company to another owner would not include that enormously valuable database, but they did NOT say that. Wake up!! This is a monster in the making, gearing up potentially to have devastating power over just about everyone.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
Slashdot *must* change its slogan:
A post from 24 hours ago.
Software Wars
Some of my changes would continuously fail to take effect. Deleting the U.S. section seems to have made the problem go away.
I'd say it's past the point of pissing you off. ;)
And my standard response: You don't have to click on "Read More"...if you don't find the article interesting, read something else. Do you complain to the newspaper when they print an article you don't read?)
Some google developers decided that today would be a good day to continue breathing....
:(
They're developers. It's not News for nerds, it's news about google.
real news please?
I like the site, and I dont want it to end up as some google arselicking rubbish.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
The sad thing is that slashdot idiots modded this insightful. Yahoo had this feature 5 years ago. The Google slogan must be Google: bringing you outdated technology today.
I had been checking every couple weeks on wind and solar energy stories... so now I just added a "Renewables" custom section with the following search:
:)
"solar energy" OR "solar power" OR "wind energy" OR "wind power"
There's probably a more elegant way to state the search- but hey, I'm extremely lazy. I know I could have gotten alerts, but those just clutter my inbox... this format is quite a bit more convenient. Nice execution too
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
YES! Now I can at long last get rid of that stupid, pointless Sports category!!
WAHOOO!!!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
$14$|-|D04 0\/\/|\|3d |\|3\/\/$.500513.C0/\/\
It's the one thing tha most annoys me about Google News.
I'd like to filter out all the sites that require some sort of registration to view them.
If Google did that and made it prominant, a lot
of those sites might change their policy since
poeple would be ignoring them. If not, then too bad
for them.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
the news itself. Like Bill Gates switches to KDE with Firefox
Epic 2014
...launching that kind of tirade against Google without posting as AC (or was that a mistake? :)..
I agree, though...Google is gearing up to becoming a privacy killer, but they are paving the road with genuinely useful services and a devoted slashbot following..
Sources say that the atmospheric pressure around the Google campus spiked severely this morning, causing the instantaneous implosion of more than 80% of the staff. Nearly all Google interns perished.
Rumors surrounding the event hint that the tragedy was the result of a bug in Google's new Weather Control System, currently in beta [weather.google.com].
Strangely, this story failed to make the front page of a popular online news forum due to their recent boycotting of Google news.
--------
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My U.S. News section just invaded my Iraq News section...
If so, you can just add keywords "Google", "Apple" and "Linux" and call it Slashdot.
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
What's even funnier (or sadder, depending on your point of view) is that the news Google presents for countries other than the US looks pretty much the same as the new for the US.
I trust the "infodel" construct wasn't a typo.
Did someone read the title as "Google Ads new personalization"? I was already thinking that I could personalize the ads that I could get from Google...
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Google makes really cool enhancements that are REALLY intuitive. Yahoo might let you customize, but in such a linear way. Google is really good at what they do.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
I wish it'd let me remove the Top Stories section or send it somewhere else. I rather have the news that interest me the most (custom searches and entertainment) at the top. I don't care about what's going on in Lebanon or some killing in Chicago.
Google is constantly pushing the envelope and setting new standards. Ahh, kudos to Google.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
So when I saw that they had added personalization, I assumed it was going to be something along the same lines, something that does my thinking FOR me, thank you very much. For example, wouldn't it be cool for the news page to adapt organically in response to stories you click on? So it would realize that I'm a golf fan (yeah, yeah, I'm even dorkier than the average /. user) and stop displaying all those NFL and hockey stories in the Sports section that I couldn't care less about.
Instead, we get the same basic layout customization and keyword matching that Yahoo has had for years (as many others have pointed out). I scratched my head for a few minutes about keywords I could use, but frankly my tastes are a bit too subtle to sum up in this way.
This could be a real story, but only if Google works a little of their statistical magic instead of taking a me-too approach.
Peer Pressure
News (about Google) for nerds, stuff (about Google) that matters . . .
Slashdotters seem to get a collective hard-on every time Google blows it's nose.
Whats the point? They still give me crappy sports stories on English Soccer and Indian cricket.
Let me customize where I get the news from, then I'll be happy. Choosing how many stories I'd want to display just isn't enough.
100% Insightful
Don't bother. I tried. All you get are stories about Jacko and guys with similar interests.
I added categories for "Heidi Fleiss", "Anna Nicole Smith" and "Tonya Harding" which accomplishes the same thing I'd LIKE a "Porn" category to accomplish, but avoids nasty topics that are very bad for my libido.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The best part about this feature is maybe finally my front sports page for Yahoo will have American sports instead of Cricket, Euro league soccer, and whatever random sports are played elsewhere in the world that for some reason come up in the US version of the news portal. I remember the day after the Red Sox won the world series, it wasnt even on the front page cuz Indonesia beat India in a cricket match or something.
Dear god, why are there people still thanking web developers for user-agent sniffing?
I found the online format nicer then other news sites and a LOT nicer then dealing with a newspaper.
Then I read the articles on slashdot about Google having a built in political bias as to which sources show up on google news and Google censoring itself on their Chinese site at the request of the government of the PRC.
I also noticed that with American news outlets that South America does not exist and other countries only exist when they have direct dealings with the US ( and sometimes not even then )
I decided that I wanted real news, online news, and news from a more trustworthy source. Goodbye google news.
Most people around the world already know about this, but for my fellow Americans who are also disgusted with American news sources I invite you to check out the BBC news site.
It is free, convenient, online, thorough, and they actually know English grammar which is not always the case for the American sources that end up on Google news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
You know - now and then I dont mind Targeted Advertising when it works, and if I have selected a bunch of news items relating to say - technology, I wouldnt mind non-obtrusive technology related ads.
If I have keywords relating to ASP.NET, C#, XML, I wouldnt mind seeing an ad for books relating to those, I may just find it useful.
When banners/etc are relevant to the site I'm on and find them useful - I dont mind. Theres been more than once I've clicked on a banner on SlashDot.org or codeproject.com or a few other sites, becuase they are advertising products that *gasp* actually do interest me, and they are non-obtrusive enough that I dont mind that they are there even if its a product I have zero interest in
MyGoogle.com
I hate Halo and GTA. Sue me.
It's been done years ago here
Space and Computers.
I've stopped reading cnn.com for that reason.
In beta still, but pretty neat. A 'search preview'...
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
jack
Shameless plug ahead: my newsbot (which predates Google News BTW), has a text version which is not only geared for thin devices (PDAs/phones) but also links to news article versions that are also lightweight. Try it out.
At least they recognize that the retarded second and hitherto-unknown brother actually is retarded and hitherto-unknown. We could have been stuck with a different-looking but intellectually-identical actor -I mean android- for the next several years.
having SBC dsl gives you access to certain premium yahoo services, (2g email, 250mg for up to 10 sub accounts, supersized briefcase, and some other junk I don't remember)
Just a few years ago, customized news was supposed to be one of the much-hyped big-money profit opportunities of the Internet, and... I'm trying to recall the names of some of the companies pursuing it as a business model... Individual?
The theory was that busy executives with no time to read the whole Wall Street Journal and no interest in serendipitous discovery of significant news items would gladly pay to get the news filtered so that they only saw items in the preselected categories of interest.
Yep, Individual.com still exists and appears to be operating on a business model of free-as-in-beer.
May the potlatch continue!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'd really like to not see the freak shot of the day with the latest Michael Jackson story. The guy goobs me out and if I could say 'if story about Michael Jackson then don't display' that'd be nice.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
... when it was called Yahoo! News. /send royalty check to David Spade
instead of doing all that...why not just watch foxnews?
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
Boobie links as fark.com
I drank what? -- Socrates
3 minutes with this customizable interface will deliver anything you would ever want to see on /. while leaving out all the cruft.
I'd like the google toolbar to allow me to take bookmarks with me on the road... I have to use both google and Yahoo toolbars to to this (the only feature that keeps me using Yahoo!)
Please upgrade parent as "Insightfull".
I agree, I've always used the text option on all of my computers. I've always been for more information and less crap on a page. (The same with slashdot- haven't seen the full blown puke green layout in 5 or 6 years.)
The problem so far is that after you customize the news, it's not custom on the text page. They could let you choose which headings to view and the number of stories in each heading. That would be cool.
More function, less form.
J
Perhaps this is on /. because it is news. It is on /. because it just happened. Therefore /. is providing us with information that some of us may not have known. THAT is why it is mentioned...NOT because Google is almighty and /. is a bunch of fanboys. I for one thank them for pointing it out, because I had not noticed the new feature.
Hell, I don't know what you guys would do if they didn't post any Google articles for you to bitch about.
"I'm in it to win it, and no limit is my home." - Snoop Dog c/o PvP Online (July 12th, 2006)
Does anyone know what Google uses to develop their web services? (eg. Gmail, News personalization, etc.)
PHP/MySQL?
J2EE/Oracle?
I'd really like to know!
try this:
o rg /
http://sites.gizoogle.com/?url=http://slashdot.
Very neat stuff -- I'd been hoping that they'd do something like this for a while. I've gotten rid of the usual "Entertainment" and "Sports" categories, shrunk the "Health" and "Business" categories, and added categories for "Brain," "Robotic," and "Space."
B yvQZAMmEJUEpDi1WIMLEpNTDVhATKeixMw8IJNbiz0oPym_JDP ZgAXmAAC6Eg4M
The result (as if anybody is interested):
http://news.google.com/news?ned=:ePkh8BM9E0KxIwNi
This rocks. I created my own categories with keywords and its very sweet. Sorry maybe it is just me but I have to have a way to reduce the amount of info I go through everyday. Instead of complaining or asking why---Good Job Google
I basically do nothing.
What's wrong with it?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sorry?
2005 - 1997 = 8 years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I wonder if they allow more nationalized filtering of sports headlines. Nothing quite like going to news.google.com, in the Sports section, and there are maybe 3 headlines for the upcoming Superbowl, and 15 or more headlines for the latest soccer gossip and happenings, 5 for the latest cricket test match, etc.
It would be as equally absurd for a European visitor to get the US' ESPN website. "Football? NASCAR? Where's UEFL? Where's F1? Where's cycling?"
Why the fuck was this modded 'Funny'??!!
Yeah, Slashdot, yeah, bend over for Google, spread those cheeks for them. Some more. There you go....
I just deleted the sports section and it felt GOOD.
San Francisco Photographers
I really don't see this news page customization feature as any indication that Google is starting to lean towards Yahoo! style portalization. They have made it pretty clear that they aren't into the portal business, or interested in creating a fully personalized page like My Yahoo! I think it's a simple user-friendly addition to Google News, and nothing more. I'll start getting worried when you can add news and weather to Google's homepage. Get some useful information about Google here: Google Advisor
Now I can have a seperate section for any news related to michael jackson... sweet. Nothing like hearing about Mikey's latest antics to brighten your day.