Slashdot Mirror
Opinion: Google Unleashes Terrible New Update For Google News Upon the Net
Rei shares their opinion of Google's redesign of Google News: Google unveiled a "new look" for Google News, describing it as a "clean and uncluttered look." New design features include a mostly empty "In the News" box for trending-topics, most of which you probably don't care about; a double-height page header so that they can make the border around the search box inexplicably larger and add a four-option menu bar; large empty grey expanses that take up half the browser; and a new news section that presents half as many news articles per page. If you didn't think you were having to scroll enough when using Google News, don't worry -- Google's got your back with this new update. It's safe to say that Slashdot reader Rei is not so fond of the Google News redesign. Have you had the chance to view it yourself? What do you think of the Google News facelift?
Well, now we know where the user experience experts that invented the ribbon went after they were fired from Microsoft.
They were fired, weren't they?
I wasn't going to say anything, but the new layout kind of looks like William Randolph Hearst wiped his ass with my web browser.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Information density is very low. It wastes lots of space, presents less information, fewer links and what remains is spread over multiple URLs (for example, one has to click on "Local" to see local news).
Horrible.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No matter where you are on the news page, be it halfway down the News section or halfway down finance, click to read an article, click back to go back, and you're at the top of the main news page.
Not a fan of the new format either, but I usually give myself a week or so to get used to it before voicing an opinion on these things.
Crap. Really crap. Think I'll stick with Reuters, CBC, and The Guardian - on my phone. It's pretty bad when a phone screen has a higher information density than a full-sized page.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I have noticed several news websites that have done something similar. Instead of mainly text, they add pictures so there are fewer stories per page. Often the lead story takes up one-quarter to one-half of the page. It becomes much harder to find information. And then, to add insult to injury, they reduce the contrast on the borders, and sometimes between the text and contrast. I generally wonder where they found there UI specialists.
It's not perfect, but it could be a lot worse.
Yes, I agree the new layout is awful. And not just in a retro-grouch "I don't like change" manner.
I have been realizing that "UX bros" are ruining computing for everyone. Computers have been turning into glorified toasters a little bit at a time, focused towards a single, minimal-click purpose, with any other usage sent to the trash. The new news site is another example.
You know... That layout looks an awful lot like the layout for this site.
Everything peaks around v3 and goes downhill from there.
Completely unusable, so long Google news, may check again in a few weeks. Moving to Reddit News (of all places) https://www.reddit.com/r/news/
Tons of blank space, far less news on the screen. It was fine before, not cramped or hard to read. I don't understand how they would think the new layout is an improvement.
I'm more worried about the content of Google news than the presentation, honestly.
The health section in particular has been full of complete nonsense. I've been seeing spam for viagra and weed lately. I'll know they've hit rock bottom when homeopathy pops up.
https://vignette4.wikia.nocook...
Just re-looked at it and noticed when I drag my cursor into a subject frame all the links brighten, very disconcerting.
The other point I would like to point out is the new format removed snippets of the stories from the article blocks so you cant tell whether it really is something you want to read or not. Now (to me) it scans like a wall of clickbait.
Meh.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Mine was already full of Goop stones and warnings not to put wasps in vaginas. The health section has been spammy shit-show for years, but the headlines were higher quality.
The thing is, the headline news quality has gone way down lately too. It used to be full of hard news, now it is over 50% misleading clickbait crap, even when it looks like it will be hard news.
The one thing it had going for it was the quality interface that gave access to a large enough quantity of data so that a person could eventually find all the news they wanted. The redesign substantially reduces the data quantity, with no changes at all that would increase quality.
I don't want a biased feed that will give me the "real" news, or the news important to virtuous people, I just want the mainstream horseshit in a single straightforwards pile so that I can learn what is being said and triangulate a few truths if I care.
Feed wanted.
I switched to ddg over a year ago. After a couple of days of getting used to it think it works as well as google.
Supposed to be more configurable, except for getting rid of the all-new cruft. No way to see double-columns (twice the info density). No more 2-3 line summaries under headlines. Defaults to show "extended" information when you click a headline, and always shows the extended pane on the top headline no matter what. If you choose auto-refresh, and the top headline that you just closed hasn't changed, it's reopened.
User friendly? Nope, user contemptible, maybe, or user vicious. I guess the A-team was busy elsewhere. They certainly had nothing to do with this piece of crap.
As a sushi platter of mainstream media news I'd rather it look more smooth and spacey than add to the agitation of the hysteric headlines.
These days I don't visit it nearly as often as before, I have to say Slashdot now covers most of my news needs.
That Slashdot posts a story about the UI change on a news site. That said, it is awful. I went to the "blog" about the change to comment on how ugly it was, but the "blog" doesn't have a comment section -- just an explanation of why this is such a good change. Slashdot has changed over they years, sometimes I didn't like the new look, but they were usually minor changes that grew on me -- apart from the god-awful moderation changes they tried to force (I set my account to classic, has that rework been withdrawn?). That said, why doesn't CNN offer a range of Skins for frequent visitors. They could even choose the most popular Skin as the default, or allow users a random choice if they like a different look every time. For that matter, Slashdot could offer Skins. Users could design and post them in their accounts like blog skins.
Letter To Iran
Seems to me Yahoo! home page/news is more like one of those "newspaper" tabloids you find in the check out lane of a supermarket.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I don't expect that Google will care one bit about the complaints of posters here; but it's a little bit of comfort to hear other people expressing the same feelings I have. I'm sure there are people out there who like these changes, but I cannot imagine why. What they describe as a "cleaner" interface is, for me, too homogenous. What they got rid of to make it "cleaner" was, for me, useful content. Scrolling around it now is actively unpleasant. Google News has been my homepage on all platforms for years. Now, I'm looking for a new site to use as my homepage.
Absolutely. The one I was quite frustrated about was when the VERY useful (for me, anyway) Usenet archive DejaNews got folded into Google Groups and then made useless. Searching for old Usenet posts now is harder than it was, and most old content appears to have gone unavailable.
Their "customizations" fail. Since when is prices of real estate stocks part of science? They're being gamed.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is ridiculous. What is wrong with these people.
I find the new layout a perfect reflection of the typical content on Google News: dumbed-down and low information density.
Wastes too much screen real estate: http://i.imgur.com/0RFAmU1.png
I have limited screen space. I want to see as much information as possible, clearly delinated, at a glance. Just like I don't like long pointless monologues and soliloquys with little informational content, I also don't like long low-content pages. It has a low signal to noise ratio.
Empty space delineates but it's a lazy way to do it and at odds with the fact I have limited screen space and want to slurp up as much info as possible with each glance. Of course there is the opposite extreme, but I would happily take the opposite extreme of very high information density, and would even prefer it if it were laid out such that I was able to maximize my information uptake with minimal physical effort.
Yeah, especially Windows...
Almost as bad as Slashdot's current interface. Nothing appeals to me, nothing offends. It's like sailing on a sea of vanilla ice cream on an overcast day.
Seems like none of these web page designers can figure it out.
Want to present an overview that will draw your users in? Represent each item with a SINGLE LINE of TEXT. Slashdot, Fark, Google News, not a single site can figure it out.
After that, hover or click on more, or whatever. But you can't beat that old tried and true one line per subject interface.
In my effort to eliminate garbage like that I discovered that Google News only allows a maximum of 100 blocked misinfotainment sites.
I agree with Rei. The "In The News" should be optional; it's a waste of space.
The Local pane on the right has the wrong location and can't be changed. At the moment, there is no way to change what Local really should be.
Setting the Language/Locael should be in settings, not on a menu bar.
And everything on the right side should be optional.
I hope the start revving soon.
Its horrible. Worse yet, I used a plugin called "Good News" to filter out all of the irrelevant garbage and that extension no longer works. Google has arbitrarily decided what is important and that I will have to read the stories they deem newsworthy. Whatever happened to the customer is always right and Don't Fix What Isn't Broken?
I'm pretty sure "What the hell, Google?" is a meme now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
In Firefox, this reduced the clutter to manageable levels:
.X20oP, .fkWPz, .FOvasf, .cZgiac, .JHzJp {
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("news.google.com") {
img,
display : none !important;
}
}
Google probably scrambles those class selectors, so we'll see what happens tomorrow.
It appears that many "related" items are repetitions (boo hiss) and where there isn't a related item, I was getting links to some horrible detox service.
I've previously searched on both pseudoxanthoma elasticum and adrenoleukodystrophy. Fortunately, I don't have both. That would make it very hard to hack user script to repair the effects of usranathema adrenocarddystrophy.
Uncluttered = less information
Basically, they took out the variant stories, leaving only their 'main' one, increased font size, put lager, annoying, pictures on what is basically an Index, and put silly squares all over the space, taking up sapce.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That makes two of us. Also a user of DDG.
BRING BACK MARISSA! She's gonna data-design and a/b test those pixels like a pro.
I heard she's available, and much wealthier than when she left Google.
lucm, indeed.
I gave up on Google news when they started serving up advertising fluff pieces as important news alerts. Now the worst thing about Google news it is a real bitch to clean off once you have installed, it most definitely does not die with a couple of clicks. Google have very much become shallow advertising driven arse holes and not to be trusted. They did some fine marketing with feel good research crap but it was just a charade to hide extreme corporate greed. Still not as bad as M$, no major corporate player (prying into peoples medical records via small business medical practices) is quite that bad but Google has managed to out evil Apple by quite a bit.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Has anyone ever had a positive opinion on change? It's human nature to not like change... It doesn't matter who it is or what the change is...
I thought I was seeing the mobile site by mistake. The new layout is from Satan who is the Devil. Information density is down by about 70%. All I see is white space (Gray space?) with a single column of news articles down the center. The old layout was far more usable for me.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Normally that would be a joke, but not this time .
https://news.google.com/news?ned=us&hl=en&dogfood=no&cf=all&q&js=0
But you have to disable javascript and set your browser user agent string to
"Opera/9.80 (S60; SymbOS; Opera Mobi/499; U; ru) Presto/2.4.18 Version/10.00"
It's the only one useragent that I've found that brings up the old version.
> You do know that google customizes the story selection to the user, based on the interests they've already exhibited, right?
> I read google news with cookies blocked and I don't get any of that whacko stuff.
Yes. Firefox doesn't allow most cookies and deletes the rest every time I close it (i.e. many times a day). I don't browse while logged into Google, either.
So yes, they should be giving me the non-personalized version.
Yeah, I barely look any more, but it's still (marginally) better than loading up a regular news site and having everything split over 20 pages.
All that said, and besides the main stories everybody gets, doesn't Google give us news the same way they give us commercials, that is, select stories based on our Google profile and their data tracking algorithms?
...circa 4.1.06.
Where do these people get their human factors training. It feels like they want to dilute the page content just so that I have to spend more time looking for topics of interest. Really, what was wrong with the existing format? Did someone fear that their job was in danger? Who ever did this should be fired outright.
>Google[..] describing it as a "clean and uncluttered look."
"Clean?" Yeah, like that is somehow good. I hate Google's interfaces probably more than anything out there (I suppose Apple's is about the same).
Clean = No functionality, choices, settings, or real customizations. Freaking hidden everything. Unintuitive navigation. Things that fade in and out when you try to read them or use them. Controls and icons that make no sense. Tons of wasted space. Replace the "Clean" description with "frustrating" or "brain-dead" and there you have it.
Give me a "File" menu bar, persistent scroll bars, tons of preferences, and real dialog boxes any day!
It's horrible. I would actually put up with the "look" part of it, if I could still get the FUNCTIONALITY part, which I can't.
I want to have a set of tabs that I can click on to open various sections I care about in tabs.. e.g. main news, technology, entertainment, etc.
I can't do that anymore. I even tried manually clicking on the section and saving the URL (the URL _does_ seem to change, to show the section info in it).. But trying to go to that URL still brings up the main section.
I changed from Yahoo news several years ago when they made a change that made me unable to do this.
Are there other news aggregators that will let me have stable URLs to various "sections" (analogous to sections of a physical newspaper) that I can open in tabs?
Yes, this IS crap.
What I want from google is information and minimal html/css crap. This is html/css crap with minimal information,
My employer provides me with an iPhone and I sometimes read news on it when I am not yelling at Siri. news.google.com got an 'upgrade' a month or so ago such that the 'headlines' stuff scrolls horizontally while the rest of the site is vertical. On one hand, this makes it easier for me to ignore the headlines, but mostly it makes my brain hurt.
Why is google all of a sudden making absurd, terrible design decisions in its news division?
it's now Idiot Valley. looks like a 1970 college tabloid.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
How to make something plain and boring...
Google News and Weather Underground are my top two sites for general information.
Long ago Wunderground did their "web 2.0" redesign but retained the (much better) classic design at classic.wunderground.com... until they finally axed that in 2015. Now I don't really have a good one page fits all weather site anymore. I was thinking about just writing my own.
Now, Google News was a treasure trove of all the most important stories of the day, with the ability to turn off entertainment (kardashians, hollywood stuff) that was densely packed with lots of alternative stories. Now it is what I've seen best described as "white space heavy". Ugh.
Definitely looking for a new news aggregator, Google News used to be the best, now it's just as bad and useless as yahoo news or any other host of mediocre news sites.
The data density is what made Google News useful and unique, now it's just another "white space heavy" mediocre news page. What garbage. So sad, how the mighty have fallen.
moox. for a new generation.
The entire staff responsible for this should be fired.
Gone are the the article intro's or summaries. I feel forced to select sources, instead of getting a mix of counter points and different perspectives to gain a better picture and understanding of events in the news.
With this format I see less News, it doesn't expand my view into things I am not seeking. It does not promote learning or discovery of other things in the world.
Its has significantly less information and less variety of news being reported.
It actually hurts my eyes to look at and gives me a headache.
That entire staff, management included do not understand user experience and design. Maybe a few of them got lucky being apart of some team that did something considered good. Its also as if Modern Web design is following the trends of the High Fashion industry that create clothing that few people could afford and most people would never consider wearing more than once. Its NOT something I will look at daily anymore unless this white washed and over simplified presentation of information stops catering to the 3 second attention span crowd who can't read anything beyond a headline or a tweet before their head hurts.
Google's Standards, if this is an ideal of example of them are broken, at least for the desktop experience. I hope they do not apply similar UI/UX standards like this to gmail and search.
They need to revert this change, and fire the entire staff responsible, imho. That particular group responsible for that change has completely lost touch with the world that exists outside of the bay area and mobile devices.
Assaults to my eyes like that Google New change, make me wish I were blind so I didn't ever have to see that. The more things like this that come out of the bay area, the more I think we are building a world like Mike Judge's Idiocracy movie portrayed.
Looking at that site re-design and trying to use it are almost as uncomfortable as hearing or reading anything about our current POTUS and the fact that that millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization lead to this.
Stop the world please, I am ready to get off.
The site seems to have been designed by people in google that were told everyone loves the simplistic and crap free layout of search without understanding why they love it. what is great for a search page sucks donkey balls for a news site where you want the relevant information in your face immediately not after scrolling or clicking through links
Dear heavens - I may have to try Bing News again.... :-(
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
But...but...didn't you learn in school that "the medium is the message"?
No, I never really knew what it meant, either.
Can't someone give me back my iGoogle? Please?
Desktop experiences suffer at the hands of managers looking to cut costs and develop one site for all platforms.
It is an absolute travesty of utility. At least we know there are hundreds of other places to get news that have thus far retained their desktop appeal.
that was horrible what they did to it
locked out of this slashdot account for 10+ years... Im back
I hate it. Please bring back the old design. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The old layout was great and there was no good reason to change. It was mostly text and made efficient use of screen real estate, especially for wide screens. Now there is all this blank space and the text is crammed into the middle, and the images take up more space. This used to be my main news feed, now I'm looking for something else.
Firefox doesn't allow most cookies and deletes the rest every time I close it (i.e. many times a day).
Yeah, it crashes a lot for me too.
Here is my slightly customized my.yahoo news reader.
Nice and compact, eh? It used to be possible to make my.yahoo look like this out of the box, but now I have to use a little bit of Stylish script.
https://i.imgur.com/ykPZEbp.jp...
The allegiance people have to an ideologically driven monopoly like Google is clearly undeserved. Especially now considering the quality and current state of the news product.
Independent, full featured and ideologically neutral alternatives exist such as https://newslookup.com/
Without your support sites like Newslookup.com will not be around and that stripped down garbage that is now Google News is all that will be left.
and it is the reason I escaped from Google+. Many of my friends did, too. But I guess they got new users? I am not sure, it may work - I do believe we're going full idiocracy, and Google may have sensed the trend better than I thought.
But it's not for me.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I completely fail to comprehend Google's notions about design. While Apple creates pretty interfaces that don't have enough buttons, Google creates butt-ugly interfaces that don't have enough buttons, and the buttons that are there, are confusing.
And why oh why don't links open in a new target pane? SERIOUSLY.
Going to be wearing out my fucking mouse wheel just trying to read the 20th article in the news now.
Maybe Google just doesn't want anyone to use any Google anything on a screen larger than 6 inches.
It's completely gay. The sections are is way too big and a waste of space. There's too much space between related stories within a section, there's a big wasted: "Google News has a new look" section with a ghost in it that you want to reply "well, no SHIT". Can we get a skinnable stylesheet for this? A chrome plugin or something? My eyes are still good and we need to smash more info onto the page. Don't make me scroll like I'm unrolling toilet paper to handle a greasy shit.
I'm more worried about the content of Google news than the presentation, honestly.
If only Google news were the real problem. When I run Google searches, the vast majority of top sites are low quality articles that have an ulterior motive (e.g., selling something else, showing tons of ads, or link to a site for the same). Paid informational sites get marked down because they are paid, even though they are far higher quality. I'm not sure whether this is a pro-active decision by Google or the SEO magicians have just gotten smarter, but now, if it's not Wikipedia, or a for-pay website, I just don't trust it.
Google needs to recognize that paid material is often higher quality than free material, and allow the user to adjust their searching accordingly. Free sites like Buzzfeed and HuffPo are filled with paid and low quality articles, and often mooch off of real reporting wherever they can. I'm not saying Google should remove the free sources, but they need to have a way to disambiguate the quality wheat from the free chaff.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The thing is, the headline news quality has gone way down lately too. It used to be full of hard news, now it is over 50% misleading clickbait crap, even when it looks like it will be hard news.
Couldn't agree more. I think the problem is that Google News only ranks free sites, where the vast majority of quality content is not free. Paying for things sucks, but Google could do a better job of suggesting to pay for content. Right now, low quality free stuff often far more highly ranked than the non-free counterparts, and it's very often the case that the free publications just summarize and reproduce the non-free reporting, often at far lower quality.
I'm not suggesting Google de-lists the free options, but there should be a button, an icon, or some way of suggesting non-free articles if they are of higher quality than their free counterparts.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
So yes, they should be giving me the non-personalized version.
If you open Google in incognito mode, you'll get the same effect.
I find it funny when people Google for themselves on their home computer and exclaim they are ecstatic to see they made the top result. Of course they are the top result, but they are the only one who sees it.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Google have very much become shallow advertising driven arse holes and not to be trusted.
I agree, but I would add that they are far better than many alternatives. For example, their privacy policies are clear, and they are straightforward to opt-out of. I also agree that Google results have become far worse over the years. You often get information-sparse, marketing-heavy pages, which are very often far worse than Wikipedia (in fact, many of these sites crib off of wikipedia).
It's possible that spammers have just been able to game Google over the years, but it's also due to Google's conduct. Currently, they vastly favor free content over paid or subscription content in their search results. That makes sense to a degree, but it would be nice if they allowed you an option to find quality paid content. They would need to do it in a non-annoying way, but very often paid content is far superior than the free stuff, and people should be open to having that option.
As a practical example, the vast majority of AP, NYTimes, and WashPo articles (all non-free), are summarized and published on sites with far lower quality. Rather than getting directed to a Buzzfeed or a HuffPo, it would be nice if there was an option to send you to the source material on the paid sites, assuming they were actually of higher quality (they often are, but there are exceptions).
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The new design is beyond awful. I have been using Google News as my browser home page for years because it was a quick way to get an overview of headlines and blurbs I cared about, and this update completely ruins the usability.
Before, I could see 10+ stories, with a snippet for a few of them. Now, I can see at most 1.5 due to the bigger pictures and irrelevant "Related Coverage" and "More About" parts. Sometimes I can't even see the whole article card because Related and More take up so much space.
I just want a small picture or icon, headline, and 1-2 sentences from the article. That way I can get a rather complete 10+ article overview in a single page without clicking or scrolling, and even from multiple sections. Before, I could see Sci/Tech and World headlines on the same page as Top Stories. Now, I have to hit Page Down twice to get to just the first such story.
So yeah, they've lost a user who had Google News as default home page for a decade. Maybe if they add serious streamlining and compact modes, I'll return. But for now, https://www.bing.com/news is oddly enough a clean replacement. Google pushed me to use Bing ...
Yep, the new news look is ugly as hell and far from good.. It's a bit like what they tried to do with SlashDot a while back.. Some UX designers really need to get their heads out of their asses, but most are just obnoxious people who think they know best for everybody, except they haven't used an application or site themselves.
Also a problem is, these people think there is only one good way to do UI, but forget that many people have different needs (or taste).
So I see that you think that google doesnt have its own server-side cookie tied to your IP addresses.
"His name was James Damore."
First they killed Google Reader, now they killed Google News, ... it almost looks like Google is helping the government give us the mushroom treatment. I am sort of hoping that they kill GMail next so I can be done with this advertising company altogether.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I get plenty of articles for the Daily Mail & the Express, neither of which are exactly left wing. It's certainly not because of my browsing habits because if I ever darken either site I do it in Private Browsing.
It's interesting that you prefer Breitbart - Americans find it only slightly more credible than The Onion.
Now why didn't I think of that?
(Thanks)
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
What do I think about the update? I think it sucks dead moose dicks. It's vaguely classier looking, but considerably more content free and massively more annoying. If I want classy looking I'll go to a fashion website.
New Coke.
I can just picture a UX twat screaming "Clutter! Clutter! All they want is clutter!" and storming out of the room.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The point behind the McCluhan slogan "The Medium is the Message" is the idea that different media have characteristics that dominate the experience of using them, and the idea that they're something like neutral conduits of information is simply wrong.
In the present context, I might make the point that there's something about all the swiping and zooming of a mobile phone interface that seems to have an addictive appeal to the chimp brains out there; and those of us who look at the web using devices that would seem to be more capable (large screens, actual keyboards) feel like the web designers have completely lost their minds because they've catering to mobile devices. E.g. every web page now has to lead off with a big fucking picture that fills the screen and forces you to scroll down just to find out what the page is about.
A lot of redesigns lately for web sites are all about this form of creating less with more. I don't know who complains about stuff too tightly place together? But it could have something to do with more developers using higher resolution screens. Or the are developing for gorilla fingered people using tablets. I'd rather have a more condensed news story list then have to scroll more.
I actually like it better. Shoving as much information on the page as you can does not work for most users. Many times when I am initiating someone to outlook, I spend 5 minutes or so making things larger and more spaced out, so they can make sense of the information. Density is fine for us tech bros, but for many it just runs together and is hard to make sense of.
"Science is the power of man"
The old format was concise and gave me text more than pictures. A picture may be worth a thousand words -- but not in this case. It seems I just keep scrolling & scrolling to get to the end, and lately, I just give up and move on. You just hate having it rammed down your throat.
Almighty Google, how about offering your humble news readers a choice? Harken to our prayer and allow a checkbox to appear that allows your servants to read news the old way. There will be great rejoicing!
Like many people, I had an instant dislike for the new format. It seems to be deliberately dumb downed. Formerly they provided statistics about how many news items were there for a certain story. Thus readers could apply different believability weights, if there are only three or four news items versus 500+ news items for a story.
Google is also not providing a way to access news in the old format. Given this, what other news aggregators are out there that covers news in the old (classic?) format?
Their blog doesn't have a link for comments of any kind. This update is truly horrid. Go fuck yourself, Google. I like compact screen layouts so I don't have to scroll.
----- obSig
which stands for "not designed for you".
They don't care what you think, it's for tablets.
v1 is the designer's dream, but released too early because computers, v2 is the designers full vision, v3 is the designer's vision debugged with major optimization. The post covered a number of systems with examples, but concentrated on Dave Cutler
Then marketing takes over to justify their existence.
The news biz is failing, and their jobs drying up, so journalism degrees are becoming worthless.
Our economic and business system is increasingly shooting itself in the foot - perhaps I should say cutting its own throat. We are told about the marvellous benefits of free-enterprise, free-market capitalism and the competition it engenders. Unfortunately, capitalists and entrepreneurs hate competition and do their level best to eliminate it: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all exemplars of the trend.
As regards journalism, smaller companies have been bought up or driven out of business, with most of the media notoriously falling into the hands of six corporations. http://www.morriscreative.com/... And those huge corporations have very definite opinions about what news and view they want people to read. (Many of them are heavily involved with the federal government, so they act more like echo chambers than critical reporters).
At the same time, vested interests are seeding the media with 'techniques of persuasion', i.e., propaganda.
I find it hard to agree that this is a new problem, because vested interests have been doing this since the dawn of recorded history. (Indeed, one could probably find prehistoric cave art that basically says, "Zog is a mastodon's arse" or "Zog for War Leader!")
The remedy is well known and simple. Education, intelligent choice, and critical faculties.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
Even with vast masses of garbage, cant and downright lies smeared across the Web, intelligent and astute readers should be able to find a small subset of sources that are usually accurate, or at least try hard to be. I know I have.
It's no shock then that journalistic standards are plummeting. Honesty and integrity in the news are getting harder to find.
One has to take into account what the vested interests are, what kind of information they wish to distort or conceal, and how much they are willing to pay. It's often said that Wikipedia is not a reliable source; but I have found it admirable for topics such as history, mathematics, and science. It's only when the subject becomes controversial - politics, religion, celebrities, sport, etc. - that money is applied and disinformation created. The same is broadly true of the mainstream media. I plan to watch Wimbledon on BBC TV, and I am not worried that Andy Murray's scores will be exaggerated or his opponents slandered. Most of the MSM's output is reasonably unbiased, but there are hot spots such as international politics.
I find plenty of honesty and integrity, but I have had to seek it out. Some journalists and organizations always seem consistent, rarely contradict themselves or each other, and never say anything I personally know to be untrue. Ralph Nader; John Pilger; Seymour Hersh; Paul Craig Roberts; Robert Parry; Gilbert Doctorow; Brian Cloughley; The Saker; Gareth Porter; Glenn Greenwald; Noam Chomsky; Andrew Napolitano; Robert Fisk; to a degree, anyone called Cockburn; Dave Lindorff; Fred Reed; Kevin Jack Perry; Ellen Brown... the list goes on and on and on.
If anyone is interested, try Counterpunch as a start. Maybe half of the material is thin, dubious or sometimes even cranky. Never mind; as Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap - so fifty-fift
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
On a desktop with a mouse pointer this new UI idea is worse than useless. Large rafts of empty space, less information presented. more clicks to get to where I wanted to go, less choice in things. Almost as though the Windows 10 UI was being copied. (The UI being worse is one reason I've been staying on Win7 for years.)
The redesign broke a site that was not broken, and I will not utilise that news source from now onwards until it is reverted to the known-working state.
I've already provided my feedback to Google on this, so let's see where that goes.. I'm not holding out much hope.
It is a pity that some people are happy to actively break something that is known to work well
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
It wasn't about putting wasps into one's vagina, it was about putting wasp's nests into such.
Seriously, at least get the facts straight before you rail on quality of the news presented.
We, my wife for sure, need to know what not to put into vaginas!
BlameBillCosby.com
Wasn't there something called Slashdot Beta with a very bad UI also? I
Sent from my TARDIS
After closing Reader and some other stuff which was useful for me (4 or 5 different products), I moved everything I need into my private cloud. For news, I still love FreshRSS, card,- and caldav are baikal based, The rest is just simple smtp, bind and some other core services.
P.S I'm writing a comment but for the love of some uber being can't figure out on what.... I can become a fan of slashdot on Facebook... no just refused a job there. There is some agile SAP to download.... sorry laughing SAP and Agile in one sentence. .
Preview looks good, but won;'t tell me where this comment is going. ... see subject
I keep Google News in one of my home tabs, and apart from the reduced density the thing I like least is that if your mouse is in the left hand 25% of the screen the scroll button has no effect on the content. It's surprising how many times it has caught me out already.
Agree.
Googles version of Slashdot beta?
Save the stockholder money. Fire the team and just revert back to the previous version. You do have backups - don't you google?
typical when marketing wank types put in charge, they copy the work of whatever is in fashion on the net (other marketing wanks). can't these fuckers just leave well enough alone?
As aside I guess the makers of "slashdot beta" were better than these kind in that they went off and made their own garbage rather then copying someone elses.....
I'm sure it is much prettier on my tablet or phone where the screen size is small and scrolling the norm. Wasn't there once a time when UI's provided people with settings for what the liked ?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The new UI is not information-dense. It needs to be.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"gray60" text on a white background. Contrast is for wimps.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I've been trying to get used to it, but its flaws are so severe that it is no longer of any use to me whatsoever.
Aside from the insanely low information density now, omitting very important things like summaries, it's much more difficult to spot stories that I am actually interested in reading.
The layout is a disaster. The enormous fixed-size banner that eats up so much of the page, and the large right sidebar that insists on staying on the page when I reduce the window width to my preferred size (making it take up half of the window) are intolerable. And that card layout -- which I hate, but could probably learn to put up with.
Worst of all is the missing features. Most importantly, it's no longer possible to sort by date or restrict stories by date. The absence of those two things alone has rendered the site of minimal usefulness to me.
On the plus side, it did spur me to install and configure my own news aggregator -- so I don't need Google News anymore.
I read Google News every day, sometimes multiple times per day. The new UI is horrible. Instant eyestrain. Fewer headlines per page, which means more scrolling (yuck), and the headlines don't pop out as well. And why put every article in a perfectly aligned box -- haven't they heard of banner blindness? Ugh!
This new format is hard for me to read. Its not visually pleasing. I am partially blind and on my normal monitors its very hard to read. the contrast is way off. I think its a terrible downgrade from what they had. To call it an upgrade is laughable.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
I, too, liked the high information density of the previous Google News. This "improvement" ruined that for me, and I've abandoned Google News (and told them so in a feedback).
So... what other news aggregator that has good information density and picks up most/all of the reputable news sources?
"I don't like change!"
Yeah, that's not what's happening. I have no problem with change when it improves things. The problem with this particular change is that it does the opposite of that.
The new header doesn't scroll with the page -- it just constantly wastes a ton of space. The old one did scroll with the page. Big, big difference.
So I see that you think that google doesnt have its own server-side cookie tied to your IP addresses.
I doubt Google actually does that. Google obviously has the technology to do so (plenty of ad networks do), but it's so obviously shady there would be a backlash.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Perhaps it's ok on a mobile device (which I don't own), but it's aggressively hostile to people on actual computers.
And the old version allowed you to choose a format; the new one is take-it-or-leave-it.
As I said to them in their feedback, it sucks dead syphilitic Republican roaches.
Drudge Report has probably the most efficient layout of any of the news aggregators. They tend toward sensationalist stories, but the British tabloids are always fun.
No sir, I don't like it. The "old" design did look kind of dated, but I could get at everything I wanted to without that many clicks. I wish they had just updated the visual style a bit and kept the workflow the same. I'll just have to get used to it I guess, I'm a news junkie and check GNews every morning @ work.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
So now to search news articles within a specific time frame, it can't be done from the news section, but only from the regular search.
Very nonplussed.
Huge wast of space. Stop letting "designers" do UI.
As far as the look is concerned, I don't care that much -- looks and styles come and go. But I would have preferred it that news.google.fr still show the French news, not the US ones. :)
Just go straight to fucking hell!
Your new Google News format sucks to high heaven on anything that is not a mobile phone or a small tablet. But, even worse, it is stupid. It egregiously fails at detecting one's location correctly on desktop system, thus foisting on many us news about places we couldn't care less about. And you, in your very finite wisdom, have decided not to provide an option to override this. This aside, your news feeds are embarrassingly provincial - it is as though you were striving to cater for those individuals who never leave their village, and are proud of it. Rest assured that my go-to news page will not be Google News any more, not on my desktop, not on my mobile phone. On the positive side, at least you now provide the option to select Fahrenheit or Celsius, rather than forcing one or the other depending on localization - which you get wrong all too often, at least on desktop systems. Finally, thanks for dispelling that preposterous notion that only geniuses work for Google.
My 1920x1080 monitor might as well be 640x1080. The fonts are huge though, so I can read the article titles from 8 feet away However, I can only see 5 articles without scrolling. What a waste of space and effort.
Short comment: I hate it.
Now. It's new, and I always hate new formats. So rather than post "I hate it comments" I'm going to stick with it for a couple of weeks. Then I can decide if I hate it or not.
An observation: It's a lot more "artsy" - and many sites (I withhold comment on this one) sacrifice "usability" for "artsy"
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Deep, Archtech. Good stuff. Calls for a 3 beer conversation sometime. BTW, my favourite Cockburn was Alexander, who died in 2012. He co-edited that CounterPunch your so fond of.
Ah yes... you are right... Google would never do things that they would profit from, any time you wouldn't like it.
"His name was James Damore."
I used to be able to scan headlines of about thirty or forty stories at a glance on my 1600x900 monitor. Now I can only see five. I'm interested in reading news, not complaining, and I've tried to figure out how to work around this, but I can't. The layout and sizing is such that if I use "reduced" magnification, by the time I get eight or nine stories onto the page the text is too small to read.
For heaven's sake! It's just a skin. With all the things they let you customize in Google News, why can't they give me a choice of information-dense and information-sparse presentations?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The google news app on my phone is bad as well. The tech section is basically just advertisements for products, disguised as articles. Science isn't much better. This is what happens when one entity is both supposed to provide unbiased information as well as please advertisers, as well as provide access to shopping search results.... no, no possibility of a conflict of interest there...
I did have the facts straight, and your pedanticism is very narrow and unlikely to be accurate.
What percent of a ground up wasp nest is made of wasp? What do you think a wasp nest is made of, twigs the wasp collects and brings home? If you knew what a wasp nest even is, you wouldn't think that there was a pedanticism to offer there. You can't have wasp nest without wasp secretions, and those secretions are made of wasp. A wasp nest is full of wasp.
Just like, bird nest soup is made of bird spit. That's the whole point; it is not a tea made from twigs, it is the bird content that makes the dish.
You also can't have bee pollen without the bee spit.
It really does suck. The top banner drops too low, the left side banner is too wide.
Here's the dictionary definition of the word of the year:
deprovement (n) 1. Google. Antonym: improvement.
Thanks! Mine is a Glenmorangie.
I agree about Alexander Cockburn - although Claud, the progenitor, goes down in history as the guy who said, "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied". Sound advice.
Andrew Cockburn's book "Kill Chain" is excellent.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I would go back to Yahoo news...if they still had that CEO in a skirt..jk I sent feedback to Google News that I would never come back again Maybe AOL has some good news site...or maybe Excite...yuccck
"In case you think my suggested sources are politically biased, I disagree."
Here's an example of the problem that I have with one of your "unbiased" sources:
From https://www.counterpunch.org/2... :
"... there was a recent high-profile alleged rape case in Germany which was not a fake story and revealed much about the way some news is presented in the western media in bias against the admirable Ms Merkel."
See the word "admirable" there? That's absolutely unnecessary and unacceptable for a news story. Just tell me the facts, and let me decide whether Angela Merkel is "admirable" or not, and your "unbiased" source is not doing that. That single word tells me that the author of the piece is not politically unbiased, but has an agenda, and I need to be aware of that if I'm going to use his writing as a basis for my forming an opinion.
The layout change triggered me to check again if I could remove Top Stories. I couldn't, so I unbookmarked it. I think they control too much anyway, so good riddance.
Ah yes... you are right... Google would never do things that they would profit from, any time you wouldn't like it.
I don't trust Google with everything (even though I do trust them more than many companies). However, in this particular case, I find it highly unlikely. If they did this, the internal Google Chrome team would raise hell over it. I highly doubt they would get away with it without it being leaked.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
There are lots of reports on the net of different family members getting ads targeted at other members of the same household who use different computers but are all behind the same router.
Not just reports, this is a widely known technique, and yes, there are many ad agencies that are at least experimenting with it (some have come forward and admitted it). My point is that I doubt Google is doing it.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I can just picture a UX twat screaming "Clutter! Clutter! All they want is clutter!" and storming out of the room.
A UX engineer's job is to provide solutions to problems. A button may not be a good solution, maybe it should be a context-based suggestion, a tab, or whatever. I highly doubt a Google UX engineer would storm out of the room, their job is to find the elegant solution.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
No, that's a human factors engineer's job. A UX engineers job is to remove most of the functionality, hide the rest, and make everything light blue on a light grey background.
No. It should be nothing, because *flat*.
Elegant looking, perhaps, though even that's debatable. That's precisely the problem with the whole UX fad.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From https://www.counterpunch.org/2... :
"... there was a recent high-profile alleged rape case in Germany which was not a fake story and revealed much about the way some news is presented in the western media in bias against the admirable Ms Merkel."
See the word "admirable" there? That's absolutely unnecessary and unacceptable for a news story. Just tell me the facts, and let me decide whether Angela Merkel is "admirable" or not, and your "unbiased" source is not doing that. That single word tells me that the author of the piece is not politically unbiased, but has an agenda, and I need to be aware of that if I'm going to use his writing as a basis for my forming an opinion.
I am glad you raised that point. The main thing you have missed is that the article in question has no pretence at all to be a "news story". Indeed, it is obviously and unmistakeably opinion. Brian Cloughley has had a long and distinguished military career; the very first time I came across his name was in 2003 when Tony Blair had asserted that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons that could be ready to attack us within 45 minutes. Mr Cloughley wrote an article stating that he had been an officer in charge of NATO tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and it took his highly-trained men several hours to do such a job. Thus Blair's claims were shown to be ridiculous. However, no mainstream newspaper or magazine or Web site would publish Mr Cloughley's article.
One other thing: when I read the article you cite, I boggled at the description of Frau Merkel as "admirable". My opinion of her is entirely different. But Mr Cloughley's praise gave me pause; I thought that if he thought her admirable, my judgment might be premature and ill-informed.
That is the thing about a world in which speech is free. Many different people express their various opinions, and we may agree strongly with some while disagreeing with others. That provides a system of checks and balances that helps us to moderate our views and get gradually closer to the truth.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.