Google Is Testing a Trending Stories Feature On Its Homepage (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday September 2, 2016 @06:10AM from the more-news-is-good-for-you dept.

Jeff John Roberts, reporting for Fortune: Google and its rival Facebook have transformed into giant media companies in recent years, working with news and video companies as part strategy to encourage consumers to stay on their platforms. Now, it appears Google is taking another big step in this direction by showing visitors three trending news stories on its home page -- right under its iconic search bar -- as well as three "trending topics." Google's decision to display trending news topics mirrors what Facebook has been doing in recent months, and will likely provide more grist for the debate over how the companies curate news, and their growing power over the media. The change to Google's homepage began to appear this week, though it does not appear to have been rolled out to many users.

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No... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-02 06:12 · Score: 5, Informative

No, Google isn't testing anything. The reporter has Pocket's chrome extension installed that's injecting content into the page.
ugh... do NOT want by vux984 · 2016-09-02 06:13 · Score: 1, Informative

the reason I set peoples home page to google is that it not cluttered with that shit.
now it's just going to be about:blank
seriously, when i pull up google.com its because i *want* to search for *something*, it is not ever because I'm looking to be distracted from the thing I was searching for with random shit trending on twitbooktube.