Have you seen the difference between the old Google news and he new Google news?
The new version has a feature which vastly outweighs any minor negatives: excluding topics. I never ever, ever want to see either sports or entertainment news. I find it offensive that these things are presented to me at all, but previously I had to scroll past sports just to get to science. Now, I can simply exclude them.
It’s too bad health is a mix of useful science-backed information and clickbait trash. But it’s always been that way.
I’m sure you could exclude topics on the old News. But I guess I’ll never be able to prove that now.
I believe you could exclude sources, but not full topics. I never found a way to exclude topics from showing up in the main list (and I tried very hard–to the point of even trying to convince my adblocker to see the topic as an ad).
I may have lied a bit. There is a line at the top of the page that says
Google News is getting a fresh look, new briefing & customized topics. Switch now.
No automatic switching to the new version tho.
Initially, if you tried out the new version, you could go into settings and go back to the old version. They have since removed the setting. For now, as long as you keep using the old version it will stay that way. If you click on the link to try the new version, then you will be stuck with the new version forever.
If you like the old version, don’t click on the “try it” link. You will never get the old version back.
The new version sucks (IMHO). Google convinced me I need to go back to Yahoo.
Not a relevant question.
Every time a website changes design, you hear an outraged backlash from some of its users, who want to go back to the design they hated when it was first introduced.
People dislike design changes because they have to learn new ways of access. Once they learn them, they dislike and new changes.
I remember the outrage when Twitter increased its character limit. No one is upset over it now.
You seem to be saying that such changes are never bad things because people just come to accept them. I disagree with this viewpoint. I believe consumers are often expected to just suck up such changes which are done more to serve the business than serve the consumer. Blaming the consumer for not being flexible/apt enough to quickly adapt to and embrace said changes seems rather patriarchal.
I didn’t click on the link to try the new version, it just appeared. Most annoying.
The main reason I dislike the new format is that they took away the simple list that you could quickly scan, and replaced with these idiotic tiles. Each tile has a larger picture than the old list, but it also has significantly smaller text. My old eyes find this smaller text to be significantly more difficult to read.
My eyesight isn’t going to get better. I am always going to find the text of the new format to be difficult to read.
I clicked on the link to try it and almost immediately set it back to the older version. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t access any of the news. I thought they had stopped supporting the old version so I clicked on the link to try the new version (knowing that I could easily go back, or so I thought), but the new version had the same problem and wouldn’t show me articles. When Google’s problem cleared up, I could no longer go back to the old version.
I was pretty ticked off, but knowing that my time on the old version was limited anyway doesn’t make me regret clicking on the link quite as much.
I hope the old version keeps working. I went back to check the AP and UPI pages that I used before Google News and they are totally different now. Pictures all over the place, taking up room that used to just be headlines. If I wanted my news in pictures I would watch tv.
Spot on. This has nothing to do with not wanting to learn something new, there’s nothing new here except the added clutter. It enhances my experience not at all.
Another vote for “the new format blows goats”.
I generally agree with that. Many times changes are arbitrary, or better, and people are just whining about it being different. In this case, my, and clearly other’s, method of using the Google News page was to quickly scan down the list of headlines for anything interesting, and then read or move on. The change to tiles has made this much more difficult, because scanning is a more complex process.
I think the problem is that the change in the page is exactly to prevent my type of behavior. The new page requires staying longer to get an idea of available stories. The old page had a lead story, but generally everything was similarly emphasized. The new page lets Google emphasize some stories by putting them in big tiles, and put other stories in little tiles.
Both of those are things which benefit Google, not users. Google thinks that people will stay on the page longer, and Google has more control over emphasis. My guess is “stay on Google” is what the page is optimized for, because Google has optimized their search page and YouTube for the exact same metric.
From news.google.com, there are a series of Topics buttons along the top: U.S., World, Local, Business, etc. Clicking on these gives a more readable, vertical format with a primary headline and three alternate headlines/sources for each story like they used to do. It takes a little longer to get through it all than it used to which might not be bad since there’s more content.
I might be able to work with this.
The headline page is compact and less vertical, but unless a particularly juicy clickbait shows up in the condensed view (and it’s not from one of my boycotted sources), I still prefer the less scrunched layout of the other more topical tabs.
What are the little green check marks that appear on almost all of the articles?
And why is Google now asking me to sign in on the Google news feed, and when I’m using the search engine?
They ate all their cookies?
I have no green check marks.