Google To Add 'News Feed' To Website and App (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is adding a personalised Facebook-style news feed to its homepage -- Google.com -- to show users content they may be interested in before they search. It will display news stories, features, videos and music chosen on the basis of previous searches by the same user. Users will also be able to click a "follow" button on search results to add topics of interest to their feed. One analyst said the move would help Google compete with rivals. "Google has a strong incentive to make search as useful as possible," said Mattia Littunen, a senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. "Facebook's news feed is one of its main rivals. It is competing with other ways of accessing content."

Comments

Not on my computer

[p51d007]

Nice that adblockers knock that garbage out. Drudge, Google and others...(I keep /. white listed though).

Deja vu

[imidan]

This is a great idea. Maybe they could organize their 'follow' system using an existing syndication technology, say, RSS, which is already widely supported by many web sites. That way, users could subscribe to sites and have stories and other items just show up in their feed. They can then read the stories at their leisure. Google could call it something like 'Google Reader'.

Re:Deja vu

[omnichad]

Nah, they should let you pick some favorite feeds and let you put it on your home page with other widgets like weather and news. They could call it iGoogle.

A step in the right direction

[DickBreath]

This is a nice effort. But it doesn't go far enough. Google, can't you please just tell me what I'm supposed to be interested in, and direct my browser to that page without any unnecessary effort or thinking on my part? Thanks!

P.S., dear Google, make Google Glass only show me what I am supposed to see. After all: Hear no evil, See no evil, Tweet no evil! Don't be evil now.

Started to care, but then I realized it's a no-op

[enjar]

I use google all the time for searches, but very rarely do I visit the search/home page. Most of the time I'm doing searches just by typing them into Chrome. It seems that they are just replicating the google assistant stuff on the homepage. I've already bought into it so .... meh. The vast majority of times I end up at google it's on some other machine where I don't sign into the google account, anyway.

There is some WTF in that Google is turning its back on one of the most ironic and clean home page designs that differentiated it from AltaVista/MSN/Yahoo/Lycos, which all had/have the "visual clutter" knob turned to 11.

Re:Started to care, but then I realized it's a no-

[omnichad]

When I'm on someone else's computer (i.e. repairing), I type google.com into the search bar to be sure I don't get Yahoo/Bing/etc.

I'll probably just create a clean white web page with a Google logo and search bar and just give it a short URL - just have it submit the form to Google.

Literally what killed Yahoo

[darkain]

This is literally what killed Yahoo, when they switched from a simple and clean search interface into being a media portal. Google became king BECAUSE they didn't have all this shit on their homepage, and everyone shifted from Yahoo to Google because of it.

Maybe this will be the surge that DuckDuckGo needs to become more prominent. If only they had a simpler name...

www and news

[CanEHdian]

If I go to www.google.com, I want a lean fast-loading page with no other crap than the Google logo or Doodle. It's already taking forever to load compared to 5 years ago or so. When I want the other stuff, I go to news.google.com (well in my case, .ca in both situations). Google needs to get through their thick heads why people liked Google in the first place. And now they want to copy Yahoo! -- we all know what happened to them. Bad idea...