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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.
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.
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.
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.
Agree. Sent them feedback immediately on the first ambush by this new horror. Far fewer customizations, insistence on presenting pictures which are sometimes relevant to the headlines. I mainly use my customized feedly account, but now I'll give reddit a try. The only worse news layouts would be Bing / MSN. If I truly wanted odd and irrelevant stuff shoved at my eyes, I'd be hanging out on StumbleUpon - which could happen if I'm truly bored. That hasn't happened since last November.
Yes, my standard tag line applies!
Every change is not progress, but there is no progress without change.
I find the new layout a perfect reflection of the typical content on Google News: dumbed-down and low information density.
The new layout benefits google, not you. By showing only the headline without the first few sentences as a summary, you have to click through to see the article to know if you even give a damn. That increases total ad views.
If you needed a reminder that you're the product, here you go.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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
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.
It's not perfect, but it could be a lot worse.
True. But you know what? It was better.
All they had to do was nothing.
They can't afford to do nothing, they have 57,000 employees that need something to do.
lucm, indeed.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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."
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.
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.
Wasn't there something called Slashdot Beta with a very bad UI also? I
Sent from my TARDIS
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.
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."