Redesigning Google News
blog.google
blog.google
They've also hidden the snippet text that let me quickly judge whether or not I wanted to click through to a full article. Presumably that's to protect themselves against European copyright disputes, but it's a big step backward for users.
I'm trying Bing News for the first time today. It still has snippets and time ranges, but also lets me see only a small fraction of the stories that match my search criteria. Yahoo News apparently doesn't permit time based searches at all. What other products best fill this Google News-shaped void for news power-searchers?
EDIT: for now I can get the old, powerful Google News by initiating a regular Google search and then clicking over to the News tab. But I wouldn't count on this escape hatch remaining much longer :-(
guess this is a reason to learn python and try scraping google news and headlines to look more like a hackernews page with article descriptions. my python-fu is low so if anyone thinks this is 'easy' or already done please let me know.
It's not designed for readability, it's designed for less density of information. It's easy to do that by putting space everywhere, but the real challenge is keeping the same kind of information density while making it more readable. Really disappointed by their redesign.
The previous design showed headlines and the first sentence or two of each article's lede. The current design just shows the headline. That's just broken, especially in the era of deceptive headlines.
One of their best features, which Google has moved away from, is linking to multiple news sources for each story.
Even within the "content," tremendous amounts of space is wasted, and less information is present than before.
I really don't, yet I've been noticing over the past few years my browser window width has been steadily getting wider to accommodate modern website design.
Sometimes we don't need a "design" so much as a list of links.
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url("https://news.google.com/news/?ned=us&hl=en") {
div.pGxpHc { display: none;}
div#yDmH0d c-wiz.jB7svb {margin: 0;}
.alVsqf .ME7ew .a5SXAc .CwaK9 {font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1em;}
.lPV2Xe {padding: 0.5em; color: #3b78e7 !important;}
.ME7ew {padding: 0; color: #3b78e7 !important;}
.adH5zf {font: 500 0.7em/1em Roboto,RobotoDraft,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;}
.kWyHVd .hzdq5d {font-size: 1em; line-height: 1em; }
.MLSuAf, .OEt0Bd {margin-top: 0;}
.J3nBBd {font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1em; border: medium none;}
.fkWPz {display: none; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-top: 0.5em; font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 1em; text-transform: none;}
.cZgiac .hzdq5d, .MLSuAf .hzdq5d {font-size: 0.9em; line-height: 1em;}
.X20oP {margin-right: 0.5em;min-width: 75px;max-width: 75px;}
.HzT8Gd {margin: 0 0 0.3em; display: flex;}
.PaqQNc {margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;}
.JoEvud {line-height: 1em;}
.FOvasf {display: none; color: #757575; font-size: 0.8em;}
.C0oVfc {line-height: 1em;}
.O0WRkf {font-size: 1em;}
.jjs37b {display: none;}
.iYiEmb {margin: 0 0 0.5em; padding: 0 !important;}
}And the whole idea of publishing "Fact Checks" like this sounds and feels Orwellian.
I don't mean to say that I don't trust those media fact checkers who dig into claims made by competing media sources, but I don't trust them 100% and I've seen blatant spin in too many "Fact Check" claims to not have to fact check them too.
Hell, I don't even trust Google search results anymore.
You think it’s Orwellian for there to be an objective truth separable from political spin? Because I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around: a big part of /1984/ was how the government ignored truth altogether in favor of whatever ‘facts’ best fit the political agenda of the moment. “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” etc.
I know, I know, you’re claiming that Snopes is acting like the government in that analogy… you’d say they’re establishing what purports to be objective truth, and what Google and others are now promoting as such, but in fact may be tainted by political bias…
But I don’t buy it. You say yourself that you consider fact checkers valuable: then it shouldn’t be seen as Orwellian to promote them, even if they’re not 100% infallible. If anything, what’s Orwellian is the actual government, as currently headed by a president who has (as president) made assertions as blatantly false and disprovable as anything about Eurasia and Eastasia.
How well do they choose sources to trust? When "fact checking" claims that Obama paid for the release of hostages from Iran, they used Vox as a primary source.[1] Surely we all agree Vox is biased.
The story originated in claims by Iranian officials, and lacking direct evidence to support either claim, any objective observer would admit there was no way to know whether Iran or Obama was telling the truth. Snopes, not being objective, confidently rated the story "FALSE".
Snopes is most useful when they're able to trace a story back to an admitted satirical source. When they attempt to judge the truth of disputed claims, they don't know more than anyone else. They shouldn't attempt to rate those disputes at all, but the temptation to use the platform to promote opinions is the Shakespearean flaw in fact checking.
1: http://www.snopes.com/obama-bribed-iran-400-million-to-relea...
- They do the research, things like finding the relevant statistics buried in some government website, as well as supplementary/background information to provide context for the claim. You or I might know how to use Google well enough to find the same information after spending enough time on it, but I’m not going to do that for every claim I feel like questioning; that’s their job.
- Most of the time there’s at least one interview with a relevant expert - indeed, even when that would seem semi-unnecessary, like when they’ve already found statistics proving something false, but still get an expert confirmation of “yeah, that‘s bogus”. I don’t know how often Snopes does this, but it definitely bolsters credibility.
- And they reason through the claim, consider different angles, and ultimately decide on a rating. This is the most subjective element, of course, and the easiest to challenge with claims of bias. Certainly I’ve ended up disagreeing with a decent fraction of their ratings, even as a sort of moderate liberal, pretty close politically to where you’d imagine PolitiFact to be. (Usually in a minor way, though, e.g. thinking something rated False should be Mostly False.) Nevertheless, I find their perspective valuable: more analytical and details-oriented than traditional publications tend to be, even the ones I like. Your mileage may vary.
Again, I don’t know how well Snopes holds up by comparison - if nothing else, PolitiFact seems to make it much more clear what exact statement is being checked. And certainly no outlet is perfect, as demonstrated by your link. But at least what I’ve read I believe to be far, far better than nothing, if you care about finding the truth rather than throwing around political slogans.
I agree fact checkers are valuable, but it's important to consider them critically because I've yet to find one truly "separate from political spin." Politifact specifically I find is usually right as a general barometer, but sometimes they reaaally stretch what makes a statement a lie/truth. Ultimately they're still a media news site and that includes some bias. I first knew Snopes as an urban legend verifier, and at least in my experience their political fact checks retain a more objective voice and tend to be less editorialized. Politifact seems to abuse their "scale of truth" to regard some politicians more critically than others. "Politician X lied, but it's only a SORT OF lie, but politician Y from the other side is ON FIRE with lies." Regardless, Snopes still uses completely biased sources at times and requires canny evaluation itself.
There's no getting around it - to have an informed opinion, you need to really understand what's happening in the news, educate yourself, and be able to critically evaluate the advice you get from sources like fact checkers. Unfortunately, it seems like that's becoming an impossible task in 2017. I think that's an opportunity for something better, maybe.
I think it is "Orwellian" for me and everyone else to have blind faith in them just because they sport a "Fact Check" moniker above their statements.
What I don't like is that a lot of the "Fact Checks" are just clickbait titles.
> "Was a Chinese Man Arrested in New York for Selling Hot Dogs Made from Dog Meat?"
Just give me the answer. I didn't click through, I'm assuming that they're trying to trigger a bias.
There's actually another one that is good:
> "Bernie Sanders' projection of 'thousands' of deaths from lost health coverage is well-supported"
For sure. Hiding the panel was done within minutes of realizing that Google didn't provide a way to either redefine/block who fact-checks or remove the panel altogether. That doesn't change the point that Google should have provided a way to hide the panel for those who don't want it.
- Being able to choose who checks facts is pretty much the same as being able to decide your own (alternative?) facts, which is the problem they're trying to solve.
They're trying to solve a problem I didn't ask them to solve. I'll do my own fact-checking.
I read the full details. There were several situations in which I thought they were being too diplomatic regarding the Clinton email scandal (meaning they were being unnecessarily harsh on Clinton).
Per their stated rating system [1], 'Mostly False' is defined as "This rating indicates that the primary elements of a claim are demonstrably false."
The slim kernel of truth in it is that the fake letter references a real court case involving the Supreme Court and Gorsuch - which seems like why it was only Mostly.
http://www.snopes.com/monsanto-suppressing-evidence-of-cance...
I was especially impressed by the note at the bottom:
> "NOTE: This story has been updated based on discussions with a number of scientists in the field. It was originally listed as a MIXTURE, but we have now reclassified it as FALSE in response to concerns that our original narrative might have led viewers into taking the results of an activist group’s lab analyses as a scientifically rigorous addition to the debate."
Here is "Food Babes" response to their "Fact Check". Look into it and follow up on what she says:
https://foodbabe.com/2017/02/24/do-you-trust-snopes-you-wont...
The argument is just that glyphosate isn't dangerous at the doses found in food, and that seems to be true based on Wikipedia's summary of the existing research[2].
That's distinct from the argument that glyophosate is safe for the environment or that it's safe for workers handling it in large quantities.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Agency_for_Resea...
We really do not know the long term effects of exposure and to dismiss that aspect ignores the cautionary principal which has been ignored far too much in this debate.
We can look at DDT as an example of what can happen when ignore and dismiss long term results. It is true DDT didn't affect those who wallowed in it and that was used to "prove" it was safe, but it is also true it affected their children, especially females, and not until they were adults did those effects become apparent.
It is also true that eating food is not the only source of exposure for everyone. And it's also true that homeowners and farmers don't always follow the instructions and laws for using these products.
So, if we read Snopes "Fact Check" on this issue it's very easy to come away thinking all those who've done independent research are wackos and glyphosate is "Safe" and may even lead some of them to say they believe it's "Safe to drink a quart of it" and therein lies the problem.
The claim: Hillary Clinton successfully defended an accused child rapist and later laughed about the case.
What's true: In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later.
What's false: Hillary Clinton did not volunteer to be the defendant's lawyer, she did not laugh about the case's outcome, she did not assert that the complainant "made up the rape story," she did not claim she knew the defendant to be guilty, and she did not "free" the defendant.
The language used is already terribly biased. Young Hillary reluctantly defended this child rapist and she merely chuckled - not laughed - chuckled!
Snopes verdict: Mostly False. What?
What worries me is that when Google and others use Snopes they're not looking at what Snopes reports, just the "verdict". If I read that "Hillary Clinton successfully defended an accused child rapist and later laughed about the case." is "mostly false", I'm not going to assume that it's mostly false because she chuckled instead of laughed, I'm going to assume it's mostly false because she did not defend an accused child rapist.
Is X true? You have to go dig around and find the answer (time and energy), or you can accept someone's opinion that you trust (shortcut).
I would say that. In fact, I trust them even less than the outlets they cover. Most "fact checking" is opinion disguised as analysis making it just a boring op-ed.
I have seen very biased fact checkers - their information is accurate, but their selection of things to factcheck were highly partisan.
But I've also seen fantastic fact checkers.
So some judgment is still needed. But on the whole, I wouldn't put fact checkers down. The good ones are far better than any news site I've been to.
The "in the news" section is just trending hashtag fluff.
"Easier Navigation" == More clicks to access the same content.
And best of all... no option in settings to opt out.
Whitespace can be incredibly helpful for readability.
The Flexport blog has a great post on this: https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrag...
In the settings, you can now block sources you don't ever want to see, by entering names. Before, you had to play the lottery of "wait until this stupid source with auto-generated news items based on stock tickers and press releases shows up in the right bar". That's the only place where you had the option to block them. You couldn't do it in the main section in the middle, which is where they tended to appear most often.
I just added a bunch.
Now, if I could follow Entertainment news about rock bands, without getting junk about the Kardashians and WWE...
Material design, in my opinion, is a disaster. Especially for desktop, where screens are huge and existing UI feedback loops are in place and well known.
* Too little information on the page
* WAY too much blank space on desktop
* It seems optimized for the brand new user experience, rather being than a powerful tool. Stop getting rid of options
* Fact check section is useless - it should be in-line related to the story if you're going to have it.
* "More about" seems like a less useful google search. Where's the value here? Picking "NASDAQ:SPLS" doesn't even show the stock price, while if I enter it into google I get links to company stats and the stock price
Imagine if the NYTimes did a design like this - they would be out of business.
So incredibly frustrating.
- What about purchases? I'd bet that the vast majority of online - not in-app - purchases happen on desktop.
- Are these companies devoting extra resources to their mobile websites and to marketing them?
This redesign is god awful for desktop use. The Bing alternative is only marginally better. I honestly have no idea who they test these on before release to think they are a) good and b) an improvement.
* Wire services only
* Fast, minimal interface
* Global perspective
I am currently focused on adding wire services from non-western countries.
You need categories something like google news has/had I'd say.
One comment about using wire services from other countries: Many of them are government-sponsored or otherwise controlled by the government/ruling political parties, and therefore can be quite biased in their presentation of local or regional news. Xinhua, Taiwan's Central News Agency, and Voice of America are examples.
I am aware of the bias that exists in many wire services & I appreciate the reminder. Some would say that there is a significant (western) bias in the services already that I have made available! I am still struggling to find a way to present a global perspective while still making people aware of these prejudices.
One of my favorite wire services I have encountered is the Non-Aligned Movement News Network (http://namnewsnetwork.org/v3/index.php), which was established to publish news that is not controlled by the interests of major world powers.
You can check out the code here: https://github.com/r1b/news-wires
Regular users will not need that left sidebar to be reminded of what sections they have configured for the page, and it takes up a large amount of screen space. The right sidebar might be useful to more people, but the "In the News" block is just words and phrases pulled from the main content. It seems redundant.
Overall I like the fresh look. Google News is one of the few sites I have been visiting almost every day for well over a decade now!
> Regular users will not need that left sidebar
It is collapsable, but I could not determine from your writing if you figured it out; click the Main Menu icon in the top left.
I agree, there is often more whitespace added with new "revisions" to Google services - Gmail, G+, News, Hangouts, etc.
Not sure what to substitute for local news though.
taking off all the padding seems to help somewhat
new - https://news.google.com/news/search/section/q/h4%20ead/h4%20...
VS
Old - https://tinyurl.com/y9tf8cou
Very weird.
I wonder if they also fixed the picture problem. They seemed to collect a random picture on the website of the article and associate it with the story on the front page of google news. This leads to terrible associations, like you would have a headline about the Queen of England illustrated with a mugshot of a thug, or an article about some rapist being arrested illustrated by a movie star that happened to promote a movie the same day.
I wish it could be a great opportunity for someone else but it would probably be quite difficult for a small vendor to effectively aggregate so many different news sources. Suggestions welcome, but I've already been looking for a while :-/
News is such an alluring area for change. It kinda sucks. I see the same stories for many days on Google News, can't mark it as "read"/"hide"/"don't care about this topic". Would prefer that over a new look.
[1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...
It's about link integrity. Nobody wants to play "roll the dice" every time they click a news article, with some asking for a credit card, others not. No doubt the paywall services pay Google to include those links, but Google should be honest and correctly label paywall links on the Google News page, or stop including those news outlets that use these redirect tactics.
Apart from that, the redesign seems to be re-inventing link hover style. Mouse over a section and every link in that section turns blue, not just the link you're hovering over. I'd prefer if the main headlines stood out more for easier scanning, keep them always blue for example, and the other text black. Or just keep links blue and non-links black. Right now it all seems to blend in, without enough visual separation. I'll be visiting less, and might jump over to Feedly or similar.
I really hope that gets fixed.
EDIT: this URL gets me Australian news: https://news.google.com/news/headlines?ned=au&hl=en-AU
now, the hover function hurts my eyes too blue color (perhaps the people at Google have very high end monitors) and there is no two-three lines, just the title. Sigh. Google news is now successfully destroyed like Quora was few years ago.
If these features address that, particularly labels, maybe I can get back to getting news from there, but the comments here aren't encouraging. I'll check it out myself anyway.
Cons: White space as far as the eye can see, no more article preview, much less content available with a lot more scrolling, slow on my i5.
All in all it's a dogs lunch
The plaintext version of the page because of the horizontal bar is now even harder to use. It feels like I need to make a site just to undo google changes and just give me a list of links again.
Another: why cut titles at 10 words short? There is so much empty space around, but I can't read the last 2 words of the title without opening the article.
What I love the most: having the entities extracted from text and entity-centric news navigation.
I use gmail because I almost entirely control that (unsubscribe, spam filters, user filters and auto forwarding) Unless they are actively deleting email sent to me and changing the content of email I am getting exactly what I want to get in my inbox
I use Google search in conjunction with duck duck go, bing, content aggregators, offline sources and for things i don't care about the source or that doesn't really have a possibility of bias (weather forecast, traffic) or when i know that the google search is really just a quick way to search something else (stack overflow, wikipedia)
the google new tab interface on mobile has such abominable suggestions that I quit using chrome on mobile (helps that I don't have a phone, just a tablet for e-reading, music and causal games)
Maybe it would have better suggestions if I turned on google tracking (app and website) or if I turned off the VPN and anonymizing proxy on my router - yeah right.
However, it is clear to me, their result is definitely biased. I do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a top list of covering on the supreme court decision on the travel ban only includes reports from NYT, WP, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune (the only right), CNN. I also do not believe an unbiased algorithm will generate a list of other top stories from only Politico, NPR, WP. So In a list of nine titles, only one right media (Chicago Tribune) got a shot, but not Fox News or WSJ. Not even CBS, ABC which are kind of centrist.
Of course, an argument would be that most of the media is left. But don't forget, the left / right split among the American voters is not that extreme. If you generate a list of new reports, which one is more unbiased: A) represent the perspective of journalists (90% left), B) represent the perspective of voters (60% left)?
My experience with Google News is that, if you do not manually customize new feed, you will get mostly from NYT and WP, almost never FN or WSJ. You will also get a lot far / crazy left stuff from Huffington post, Daily Beast, Mother Jones, but you will never get national review, not to mention breitbart.
Your basic problem is viewing this as a left/right divide, when it's really a reasonable journalism/explicitly partisan reporting divide. Conservatives have been trained by decades of talk radio to think this way, and now all they have left on their side is a bunch of charlatans. CNN or MSNBC aren't paragons of virtue, but at least they are not completely disingenuous hucksters like the ones Fox trots out all the time. Hell, MSNBC even features their own right-wing charlatan in Hugh Hewitt.
EDIT: Oh, and I totally missed your remark about the Huffington Post. The reality is quite the contrary! Until the recent lay-offs post the Verizon acquisition, they had some of the best reportage on legislative activities in the House. Certainly, they have a liberal bent (which they do not hide), but the reporters they have (or had) are very good at their jobs.
Also, I see lots of Fox and WSJ.
A study a few years ago found that WSJ's news is liberal, but their editorials are conservative. I think things look very different if you are able to forget about the editorials.
And, finally, the left/right split of people who read news is not the same as the US overall. Even if it were, it would still skew liberal, just as the US does.
Human expression on the other hand generally is.
Partisan, by definition, is prejudice, the opposite of objectivity, and an enemy of "reality".
The natural human condition, (at least in culture or society) is to be biased (often unthinkingly, out of cultural training or personal interest). Overcoming this is the path towards understand reality.
What I mean is that, in the US, Democrats are not equally far from the truth as Republicans. Or, if you want to rephrase it without the parties, liberals are not equally far from the truth.
Objective facts will not be perfectly diplomatic. They will appear to be biased in one direction or another.
This is true of literally every issue in which one side is closer to reality/truth than the other side. I don't need to cherry pick because that's every single issue (as long as they disagree, anyway).
Sure they are. Perhaps further on some things. It just depends on what aspect of the truth you are talking about. Economic reality or the age of the earth?
Mistaking bias, value judgement or personal preference for objective reality is a common mental trap. It's taken people, organizations and even whole cultures down many times.
Are you suggesting because Google News developers believe NYT and WP is more trustworthy than Fox, like you do, so they always automatically pick NYT over WP? And this is considered as unbiased?
Or, do you mean they have a super AI to determine which news report is close to reality on each single case? So this is considered as unbiased?
Yes, absolutely.
> How is this related to my post?
You said you don't believe an unbiased algorithm will generate so many articles from WP or NYT. I disagree, depending on whether the article is based 100% on pageviews (it's not) or also factors in trustworthiness.
> Or, do you mean they have a super AI to determine which news report is close to reality on each single case?
My understanding is that they have a mix of AI and an editorial staff. From what I've read, the goal is not to find the closest to reality, but rather the most "canonical" story (closest to being first-hand, earliest, and most thorough).
For example, most of the top stories about the Boston Marathon bombing a few years ago were from the Boston Globe, even though every newspaper was covering it. There were certain scoops/angles that were from other sources.
This may not be how the algorithm works exactly, but my point is just that "lacking Fox News and WSJ" != "biased".
At least this afternoon I still had access to the old design by disconnecting.
What Google has now is a collection of mainstream press classified in just a few subjects, almost the opposite of what I want.
I guess it will make Google News appeal more to Joe Everyman, but holy cow it is a blow to being able to find news stories for a specific period of time (e.g. only show me stories on "am4 itx" within the last week, so I don't read blogs reposting news about a "new" motherboard 3 months after it was announced)
And yet Google continues to ignore Google Finance, which is by far the least updated Google operated site I've seen in ages. I mean, you still have to install Adobe Flash to get interactive charts, and the basic charts are simply an image. Seriously now?! Every other finance site has had fully HTML5 interactive charts since years.