Google News Offers Olive Branch with Two-Column View
After two straight weeks of fielding complaints about the revamped Google News, the search engine has finally bowed to the Google June 30 offered its biggest refresh for Google News ever, adding more personalization features that let users promote or demote content and publications they liked or disliked. The problem is, there wasn't a problem with Google News. The majority of users seem to have liked it just fine before, according to the majority of the complaints on the Google News support forum here. So the company, which told me that it would not bring the retired version of Google News most folks liked back, made some changes in response to the ire. The biggest of these rather small changes may please some users who loved the way Google News was before. Before June 30, Google News employed a print newspaper-like layout, sporting a three-column top section with a two-column bank of stories below. Then Google took this layout away in the refresh, forcing users to rebuild their custom content views. Google News Product Manager Chris Beckmann acknowledged the pain this caused, noting that while hundreds of thousands of users customized their Google News homepages:
some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns. In response, the company added a two-column tab to its viewing options, which already included a list view and sections view. Check it out:
Clicking on the two-column tab yields this display, which shows the top handful of stories from each section:
A couple more changes to note: rather than simply expanding a cluster when users' mouse over it, Google is now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story. Users can also now make the weather forecast from their local news section vanish. What do you think of these minor changes? My guess is they will be insufficient in pleasing most of the gripes. The old layout was dearly loved and will be sorely missed. Google is inviting compliments and criticisms here on its Google News Support forum. |
Comments (4)
these modifications are a joke.... The basic reason why people are so mad is that Google News went from being a 90% personalization news source to a 30% personalization news source... The new "improvements" impose a required/forced right hand column worth of news sections that can not be removed or edited....
Combined with the fact that the entire first section (i.e. Top Stories) is also un-editable, users are left precious small screen space to read the news that they are actually interested in....
For example, lets say you hate entertainment news. Under the new system, you will be reading about Kim Kardashianwhateverhernameis in Top Stories, in Recent News, in Spotlight, etc. Once you've skipped over all this news that you hate, you get to the actual news that you want way at the bottom.... Also, the screen is taken up by other information that you can't control like weather and Google's guess at your location based on browser location (what if you're more interested in another location? or if you're travelling?)
Google gives you new options now to eliminate these new forced sections, therefore taking it from a personalized news source to controlled-news-network.... which I suspect is what they want for revenue purposes...
Posted by nhr | July 16, 2010 2:32 PM
You should publish screen capture thumbnails from a wide-screen monitor of the old two-column format (still at news.google.ca) and the new one (at news.google.com).
If you show these next to each other, the huge amount of wasted space in the new format vs. the old one (regardless of the latest fix) will be easy to see, and your readers will have a better understanding of some of the angry complaints.
If your local newspaper gave up the standard format and started leaving 5-inch wide scrolls on your doorstep each day, you'd be unhappy. If they responded to your complaints by printing more, but narrower columns on the same narrow scroll, you'd still be unhappy. Actually, it's worse. For widescreen users, Google is delivering 12-inch wide scrolls with 5 inches of news and 7 inches of wasted paper.
Posted by Steve Kass | July 17, 2010 6:16 PM
1. The "new" two column format is fine as far as it goes, but the damn thing defaults back to the intrusive selectability insert every time I view an article then go back to Google News. This is just somebodies trashy way of sticking their middle finger up to those of us who REALLY DON"T LIKE the new News.
2. Why are you doing this evil?
Posted by Bill Macklin | July 19, 2010 9:17 AM
Take a pile of crap and sprinkle perfume on it you still end up with a pile of crap. http://breakingnewsfeeds.com/ is my google news replacement.
Posted by John | July 19, 2010 12:39 PM