They also ignore the “Hide Sources” setting. I have both Fox and CNN hidden and they were showing articles from both.
I think I’ve got Feedly configured nicely now, btw. It’s just a matter of grouping sources of equal output, so one doesn’t swamp out the other while splitting things out into enough groups that you still get an array of articles and they aren’t just the top clicked.
My guess is that Google changes their products when they come up with a way to improve ad revenue. Whenever they add a useful function, it’s not mainly because it’s useful - the function is there mainly because it makes more money for Google. Whenever they replace a useful function with a less-useful one, it’s because the new function tracks you more effectively, or forces you to click more, or whatever else may make it more profitable to serve you. (“Serve” in the sense of “display you on a platter”, as well as - less importantly - the sense of “do something useful for you”).
That would be my guess as well.
Then I look at what they’ve actually done and scratch my head. You are correct of course. But damn, they are driving me away. Not good for you, me, the other posters here, or them.
I can see why they dropped the data feed at Google Finance for example - that costs money. But a lot of their new site looks like it was made by a sophomore art student with a penchant for airy design. As opposed to someone who wants to track their investments. Yahoo has also downgraded their finance section with its pushing of video content and sprucing up. But I get that. And I’ve shifted my eyeballs to them because of Google’s lapse.
Absolutely it’s good for them - otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
As of today it looks like this hack doesn’t work any more. 
Those links now return search results for the string “%” (or “%ned”) as an RSS feed rather than simply displaying something akin to the old Google News page as an HTML page.
If anyone knows of a way of getting the old behaviour back, please let me know. The new Google News page is useless for me because it is polluted with sections that I don’t want to read (Business, Sports, Health, etc.). My custom sections are always two clicks away from the main page and can be read only one at a time.
This morning I was getting RSS feeds, but I just tried again now, and it seems to be working as before. Both the links above are showing the old-style news pages again. So I hope it was just a temporary glitch.
I still hate both the new Google News and the new Gmail.
Still not working for me. I’ll check again tomorrow in case, like you said, it’s only a transient problem.
No. It’s gone back to showing the feeds. :smack:
I suppose not all Google’s servers are updated simultaneously.
So off to https://theoldgnews.com/ , but it’s not personalised.
TheOldGoogleNews now has an announcement that G***le has again changed something that makes it too difficult to replicate, and they’re shutting it down permanently.
I’m so fucking sick of G***le and so many other sites “improving” themselves to the point that they no longer work, or are no longer useful in ways they once were.
One of my very favorite sites has remained a favorite of mine for nearly 20 years because they’ve left their interface mostly alone. Any tweaks have been on the back end and they’ve avoided changing a nice clean page that works well. Why is this the exception? Why can’t these asshole companies make a decent product the first time and then leave it the fuck alone??!!
Feedly is still good.
Feedly is an RSS aggregator, no? If so, in what way is it a replacement for Google News? I don’t want a firehose of every story from a fixed set of newspapers; I want a clustered list of top stories, on broad topics matching my interests, from a wide range of sources.
I was also using that page. Are you sure Google didn’t change their interface deliberately, at least in part, to interfere with OldGoogleNews? I think I’ll use Bing News for a while. (I don’t really want “personalized.”)
Joseph Elfelt — AFAIK just a “guy”, not a company — has got his great Mapper working again — GISsurfer General Purpose Web Map and GIS Viewer | Surf GIS DATA. Google forced him to stop using their data; but he still has access to to other data, e.g. ‘ESRI Aerial’, which may be adequate for my needs.
The Google service I miss the most is Google Finance. This puzzles me. It provided stock-price graphing hugely better than any other site, but AFAIK they didn’t replace it with a high-revenue version — they just destroyed it altogether. 
There’s a setting to boost stories based on popularity. If you pay, you can filter out keywords, but I’ve felt no need to do that.
At the free level, you can accomplish a lot by grouping similar sources. That way the most popular source doesn’t crowd out the others, they’re in even combat for space.
If you want a broad range, then add a broad range. I have about 30 sources, but there’s nothing to stop me from adding a hundred. At the end of the day, even Google is looking at a subset of all sources and even though I asked them, for example, to show me stuff from RAND, I don’t think they ever did once. Feedly does, because it can’t not.
Once you get everything laid out in a way that you like, I would say that the experience is just slightly better than Google was. Not by a ton and it took a bit more work to get it there, but Google was limited a little bit by what it could recommend based on what it expects your average person to really want to see. If you’re not an average person and you’re actually interested in reading RAND or Ghanaian news, then Feedly can make that happen.
Possibly, but before that they had a good news site and then screwed it up, hence creating the need for OldGoogleNews.