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
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.
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!
Porn.
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?
YES! Now I can at long last get rid of that stupid, pointless Sports category!!
Right On!! With the time you save not having to pagedown past the Sports Section, you'll have more time to write in your blog!
Just like almost any other web service out there, if you're uncomfortable using it, don't sign up. That's pretty simple.
Google News is good enough on its own without requiring the user to login and customize the search, so it's not like they're forcing you to provide your data. It's 100% opt-in.
Additionally, since a free email account can be 100% anonymous (unless they subpoena your name from your ISP, which they can't do on their own), there's no way to link all that data to an actual person. Think Google is invading your privacy? Change your account once in a while or don't sign up to begin with.
You tinfoil hat types need some common sense.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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