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Google News To Be Revamped, Incorporate YouTube Videos and Magazines (arstechnica.com)
Google News is reportedly being updated with a "new design" that will "incorporate elements of the [Google Play] Newsstand app and YouTube." It will be powered by Google's AMP technology and is expected to launch at Google I/O 2018. AdAge was first to report the changes. From a report: A Google News redesign is surprising considering that the current design is less than a year old. It's unclear if the current design is just being tweaked to incorporate YouTube and Play Newsstand or if the whole thing is being scrapped and rebuilt. The report also mentions that Google News will get a new app. Google Play Newsstand is currently an odd hybrid of magazine store and RSS reader. The report says that Google Play Newsstand is going to close as part of the Google News redesign. This is the second time we've heard of a "Google Play" brand getting the axe: Google Play Music is also expected to close when it merges with YouTube. We should learn more about the changes at Google I/O, which starts next week on Tuesday, May 8.
Can't we just read it? More efficient, more pleasant, less annoying. I guess they must get more ad revenue when they can force us to sit through video ads.
No doubt the key problems will remain: the failure to flag pay-walled content and the total inability to blacklist particular news sources.
I stopped using Google News with last year's horrific revamp. I'm shocked it still exists. The last thing I want is more video centric content. When I'm reading news, it's often when I'm places where having a video with sound would be a disruption to those around me. I also prefer skimming through to get the important parts of a story. Video sucks.
The last redesign (sometimes?*) made it impossible to simply search a topic and view the results chronologically, so that I can easily see all new articles and ignore the old. Just let me do that, and don't censor based on politics.
I'm not interested in videos on the news feed.
* Sometimes it appears that part of the old Google news format is present, but usually when I search it goes to mobile hell.
I stopped using Google News when the last redesign happened.
How do I want thee less? Let me count the ways:
(1) Mostly stop showing news sources that I've already assessed as sources of worthless sludge and fake news.
(2) Fewer intrusions on my attention for no real reason.
(3) Fewer updates. Should be a user default, and in my case I think I'd prefer to set it for twice a day.
Several other thoughts, but the snark on Slashdot has reached such a tiresome level... I wonder if that's related to the evidently low interest in the story?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"A Google News redesign is surprising..."
No it's not at all surprising since Google has faced harsh criticism of that redesign, which put everything into a single column. The previous version was much more useful than the current.
Just another day in Paradise
Google news is reasonably useless outside of a political propaganda unit. They've given big to DNC with the past and donated staff to 'help get hillary into whitehouse'.
Nowadays it's all about political 'message shaping', censorship 'de-platforming alternate views'. It should be registered as a political PAC.
'Google News' isn't news, it's propaganda, and we don't need any more of that sh*t spat at us.
Guess Google news is done for me. Don't care about watching video's to get the news. I prefer to actually read a news story. Is it that young people can't read these days so everything has to be presented in a video? I already think Google news is bad, and this will make it worse!
I haven't been there ever since they started trying to guess what news I wanted to see, rather than telling me what news they thought was important. That's not news. It's just enhaced advertising.
Time to switch to NewsLookup.com
I used to love Google News; you got a decent range of sources and could filter out the really shitty ones and choose subjects that were of actual interest. I want to hear intelligent opposing views, but I don't want my news feed full of drivel from either side.
Gradually more and more "local" news sources just regurgitating the same exact same stories appeared, and it started forgetting that you'd banned certain sources. Currently you can only blacklist one publication; adding a second one looks like it works, but actually removes the first one from the blacklist...
Anyone know of a good news aggregator that allows for real customisation?
Also change the name, to make it more confusing. Even better, have two products that do more or less the same thing, with wildly different names. That will make things even more confusing. That seems to be Google's goal, right?
If their revamp is anything like what they did to Google Finance, then Yahoo's about to get a bunch more page impressions...
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Their last redesign was supposed to cut down on fake news, but that's all their "Spotlight" section is: hysterical headlines, clickbait, and links to super biased sources (homeopathic medicine sites, anti-abortion sites, Christian news sites that describe everything in apocalyptic terms, etc.). I set up an AdBlock filter to weed out the worst offenders, and eventually stopped visiting Google News entirely because I couldn't keep up with the flow of garbage; every time I blocked one source, another two would pop up in its place.
Stick with NPR.
I used to use google news regularly, they seemed a perfect aggregation of news with the option of adding your own sources, however I stopped because: ...", it might be a curiosity, someone might like it, but science?
- there was no option to turn off google pre-selection, so instead of having access to the latest news I kept seeing week old (or even more) posts constantly, I asked google service for such option - no response
- I kept being forced upon with news completely out of mind, I don't even know where they find them, again, no option to select sources, or some basic fact check from google side, to be fair there is an option to disable a source, however they keep popping up, and somehow google algorithm finds them more important then some fact based news
- final decision to abandon the platform was (constant) pseudoscience in science section, like "somebody calculated the end of the world on April
I switched to BBC and have never regretted since. I consider going to google news aggregation a waste of my time. In theory would be a great tool to have instant access to fresh news from many sources, but in reality is just annoyance.
Will the new new Google News be wrose than the new Google News ?
Will we need to fake the user agent again to get something just usable ?
stage of development.
Don't really innovate anything; just piss about at the edges and generally degrade the user experience.
"Google News To Be Revamped, Incorporate YouTube Videos and Magazines"
I guess sentence structure must be impossible to get right when writing headlines.
You've yet to say anything relevant. Are you some sort of troll?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It's been like eight months since the last redesign, which made it worthless. I've settled on http://theoldgnews.com to get back to a usable version.