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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
Would slashdot have reported this if it was Yahoo (or something else) which did this instead of Google?
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 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?
I hope i'm not the only one who want a such featuree on Slashdot too. Wouldn't that feature be quite useful here?
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.
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"?
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!"
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
Marge: Do you want your son to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or a sleazy male stripper?
Homer: Can't he be both, like the late Earl Warren?
Marge: Earl Warren wasn't a stripper!
Homer: Now, who's being naive?
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!
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