Why the New Google News Sucks | Hacker News Reader

Why the New Google News Sucks

asktog.com

39 pointswazoox13 comments

"The United States of America has the oldest government in the world."

That's sure not true. Iceland holds that distinction. Google News might have screwed up their layout, but Google is still helpful for fact checking before publishing.

That's not a matter of fact, that's a matter of semantics. Checking up on your fact, I find that the Althingi was founded in 930 but suspended in 1789 and Iceland was ruled by Denmark until 1918, so that doesn't sound very continuous.

England has had a (Cromwell aside) unbroken series of monarchs since 1066, does that count?

Still, the US should get some kind of old-government distinction since it's had absolutely uninterrupted constitutional democracy on all levels since Washington's time. (At least in the states that didn't secede.)

The author had to mention England explicitly in order to give an excuse for why it didn't count. (I would be interested to learn when this supposed "transition from monarchy to democracy" took place. 1215? 1689?)

Yes, that was the paragraph that lost me all respect for the article.

> the US should get some kind of old-government distinction

"Washington's time" was only 270 years ago! As experiments in government go, the USA is still a spring-chicken.

I changed my "edition" to Canada, as that's apparently the only way to avoid the new design. Hopefully it takes them a very long time to push the new design to other editions.

I stopped visiting both Google News and BBC News because of their respective and recent UI degradations; the former because I can't find anything and the latter because I can't find what I used to.

Both web sites have been replaced with the Reuters and BBC News iOS apps.

As he mentioned, the international versions of Google news still use the traditional layout. It's not hard to find it incredibly better...

Check out the political rant masquerading as #1.

He doesn't masquerade anything; it states that the new layout isn't as politically neutral as the old one, and affirms it to be a bad thing, which is hard to argue against given the sad state of politics in the US.

Well, right or wrong, it was a little out of left field in the midst of an extended design critique. And saying it was "a force in stabilizing the United States of America" is a little bit overblown.

I agree with you about the overblown part, but I do think it has a part in a design article. The selection of information is an important factor in the final output from a design perspective. Design is not just look and layout without consideration of content and content selection.

That being said, I kinda like being able to exclude certain sources, but mostly for a different reason then to create and echo chamber. I like excluding sites that have poor viewing experience.

I don't think so. That was the first mainstream channel which provided convenient links to news in English even from other countries.

It's not much of a political rant; I can't even tell which side of politics he's on by reading it.

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