For general queries like [global warming], [love], [Mandela], [China], Google shows some in-depth news articles at the bottom of the first page of results. Until now, Google only included 3 articles, but this has changed: you can click "more in-depth articles" and get 5 more articles.
Google also added some related queries you can explore to find other related articles. Clicking the "explore" links sends you to a page that places in-depth articles at the top, but also shows regular search results. Google adds &ida_m=1 to the search URL.
Google tests a card-style interface for the Google News OneBox. It's bigger, snippets are shorter, there's a lot of white space and the link to Google News search results is placed at the bottom of the card.
Here's a screenshot of a Google France search results page:
If you search for a broad topic like [love], [global warming], [censorship], [North Korea], Google shows 3 in-depth news articles at the bottom of the first search results pages. It's an effort to go beyond promoting recent news articles and reward news sites that write detailed articles and in-depth analyses.
Here's an example for [recession]: 3 long articles from Esquire, New York Times and Forbes.
The results for [amazon prime] include a Gizmodo article.
The results for [startups] include a TechCrunch article from April 2012 about the top startup ecosystems.
The first in-depth result for [cloud computing] is a 2007 Businessweek article about Google. It's called "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds".
"To understand a broad topic, sometimes you need more than a quick answer. Our research indicates perhaps 10% of people's daily information needs fit this category - topics like stem cell research, happiness, and love, to name just a few. (...) I'm happy to see people continue to invest in thoughtful in-depth content that will remain relevant for months or even years after publication. This is exactly what you'll find in the new feature. In addition to well-known publishers, you'll also find some great articles from lesser-known publications and blogs," says Google's Pandu Nayak.
There's a help center article that offers more information about this feature. "While the feature is based on algorithmic signals, there are steps you can take as a webmaster to help Google find your high-quality, in-depth content and best present it to users in the search." Google suggests to use schema.org article markup, Google authorship markup, logos and content that can be accessed without subscription.
Google News has a similar section that's called "spotlight", but it only includes recent news articles. "The Spotlight section of Google News is updated periodically with news and in-depth pieces of lasting value. These stories, which are automatically selected by our computer algorithms, include investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal. To access the stories in this section, just click Spotlight on the left side of the page."
Google tests an updated version of the Google News OneBox, with bigger thumbnails. The images are really big and I find them distracting. Another change is that the first link no longer sends you to a Google News search results page, it points to a news article and borrows its title.
Google News is the latest Google service that gets a new design consistent with Google+. There's a new color scheme, more white space, a new header and two buttons that replace the customization links.
It's strange to see the label-less blue search button next to the "search the Web" button. Gmail's new interface uses two buttons that are easier to differentiate, instead of confusing users. There's a lot of wasted space at the top of the page and the two new buttons are too prominent, especially if you consider that you'll not use them very often.
In a recent Google+ post, Larry Page said that Google has launched a "beautiful, consistent and simpler design". He continued: "Google+ is also a great example of another focus of mine - beautiful products that are simple and intuitive to use and was actually was one of the first products to contain our new visual redesign." A New York Times blog post quotes Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO, who concludes that "there was just too much clutter. Larry in the last 90 days basically said, 'Hey, it's just time to re-shift. Don't lose any insights into the deep engineering that we drive, but let's make sure we don't lose focus on the ease of use."
Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. "The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends," informs Google.
Google created more than 500 badges, so it's very likely that you'll collect at least one of them if you visit Google News frequently. Badges reward people that constantly read articles on a certain topic, so you're more likely to receive a badge if you read 3-4 articles a day about Google than if you read 10 articles about Google every 3-4 days.
While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. "Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are," suggests Google.
Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It's one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.
Badges also help you find your favorite Google News topics and add customized sections to the homepage. Google News now uses sliders to let you fine tune your personalized hompepage.
Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia content more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to manually expand them.
"The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don't use and have a more streamlined experience," explains Google.
By default, Google uses the single column view, but you can switch to the two column view with the added benefit of going back to the old interface. Here's the new interface:
... and the classic interface:
The redesigned UI shows a single news article instead of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it's strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, has recently said, the service "groups news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place".
Power users can try Google's keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will rarely expand stories and only click the main news article.
Barry Schwartz spotted some new options that let you personalize Google News. If you go to the Google News settings page, you can tweak Google News to show fewer press releases, more blog posts or even hide all the blog posts and press releases. "The neat part of the control of how you see blog and press release results is that there is a lever. You can pick from None to Fewer to Normal to More. Everyone by default is set to normal," says Barry Schwartz.
You can also disable the automatic refresh of the Google News homepage. By default, Google reloads the page every 15 minutes.
I tried to hide all the blog posts and press releases, but this only worked for search results. Google News sections still included blog posts and press releases:
Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers, but not many websites optimize their interface for Opera Mini. Most Google services have two mobile interfaces: a basic WAP interface and a more advanced interface for smartphones. Opera Mini always displays the basic interface because the browser is actually a thin client that can't handle web apps properly. Fortunately, there's an exception to this rule: Google News shows the smartphone interface in Opera Mini.
"While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we've also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser. So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone," informs Google.
Google's blog post ignores that Opera Mini is also available for iOS, Android, Symbian and other mobile operating systems, so it's not just a browser for feature phones. Opera Mini is really useful while roaming, for slow Internet connections and for data capped mobile contracts. Hopefully, Google News won't be the only Google service optimized for Opera Mini and Google services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums will fully support Opera's desktop browser.
While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we’ve also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser.
So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone.
We hope that this will improve the news browsing experience for Opera Mini users around the world, including millions of people using a feature phone as the primary point of access for the web. See it here in the Indian Hindi and Nigerian English versions.
So, pick up your feature phone and point your Opera Mini browser to http://news.google.com to catch up on news anytime and anywhere. For more information or to share your feedback with us, please visit our Help Center.
Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead and Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager
Google News has a new section that lists the most shared articles. It's not clear if Google counts the number of people who used the sharing feature from Google News or tracks the references from Twitter and other social sites, but Google's chart is not very reliable. When I started to write this post, the most popular news article was a story about Google's Groupon acquisition that has been shared by 2,189 people.
15 minutes later, the most popular article was a NASA press release shared by 10,893 people.
Google News continues to integrate with Twitter and other microblogging services. After testing a section that shows newsworthy tweets from your subscription, Google started to add to the Google News Onebox the number of times a story has been shared.
For example, Google's Onebox shows that this article about Google TV has been shared by more than 50 Twitter users. Google links to the realtime results for this article, but the page only includes 10 results.
"Friends is an experimental section in the side column that helps you find news articles that your friends are sharing on Twitter. In the open text box, enter your Twitter username and click "Save." Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow. Please note that Friends only shows you articles that can be found in Google News. If someone you follow has shared an article or a link that cannot be found in Google News, then you will not see that update in the Friends section."
Maybe in the future Google News will use your Twitter timeline to customize the list of news articles displayed on the homepage or to annotate news clusters.
After many months of testing, Google News redesigned the homepage and made it more customizable. One of the most important changes is that each group of related news has a topic ("Mobile industry", "Toyota", "Tropical storm Alex") and you can easily subscribe to the topic.
Google News has a new section called "News for you" whose goal is to show news about your interests. You can add custom news topics, select how often you read news about each topic and choose if you want to see the news grouped in sections or as an uninterrupted stream.
If you like some news site or dislike news sources that provide biased or irrelevant news, you can now personalize Google News and list your preferences. Click on "Settings" at the top of the page, select "News settings" and start typing the sites you'd like to see more often or less often in Google News.
"Sources you promote or demote will be ranked differently for you (but not for anyone else) in your Google News search results and in the stories that you browse on the News homepage and other sections. Please keep in mind that demoted sources may not entirely disappear for you in Google News, and promoted sources may not appear in all of the stories you see," mentions Google.
Each news cluster has a small menu that lets you share stories on social sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader) or by email.
Google News also added keyboard shortcuts that are available in other Google applications like Gmail and Google Reader: j or n (next story), k or p (previous story), / (search), s (star), . or f (share), Enter (open the headline article for the current story). Unfortunately, keyboard shortcuts are an afterthought, so you'll find many flaws: after selecting the "Email" option, you need to use your mouse to click on the "To" field; after opening the main article of a story and going back to Google News, the story is no longer selected.
"The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We're making the ability to choose which sources you'll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon," explains Google.
Google has a special page that provides more information about the new features and another page that shows you where are the old features and which features are new.
Google News is now more customizable and has a lot of features that should appeal to Google Reader users. You can't subscribe to news sites, but you can subscribe to topics and list your favorite news sites. Google News lets you star and share each story, navigate using keyboard shortcuts and read news recommended for you. Google News has suddenly morphed from a news aggregator into a news reader, from a website to a web application.
Google Dictionary has a lot of useful information about English words and expressions. Besides showing synonyms, antonyms, definitions from the dictionary and from the web, related phrases, Google Dictionary added usage examples from Google News.
Google extracts the quotes from news articles and attributes the quotes to their authors. You can find quotes in Google News if you search for the name of a popular person and click on the "Quotes" section (e.g.: Gordon Brown, Steve Jobs). Unfortunately, you can't restrict Google News results to quotes.
"The News Archive Partner Program provides a way for Google and publishers and repositories to partner together and make historical newspaper archives discoverable online. As part of Google News, the News archive search function provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. For articles already in digital format, we've worked with the hosts of these archives to crawl and index their materials. When materials aren't easily available in digital format, we have partnered with the copyright holder to scan and present the newspaper in a way that is full-text searchable, fast and easy to navigate," explains Google.
Google News added a new feature that lets you star news stories. If you click on a star next to a Google News cluster, you'll add it to the Starred section and Google will notify you when it finds related articles.
"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information," mentions Google News blog.
For some reason, Google doesn't add the starred news stories to Google Bookmarks and there's no option to star a news cluster after you open it. Another issue is that the Starred section only includes the most recent 20 starred stories.
I don't know if this is best way to use this feature, but you could star news stories to read them later. If you don't already use Instapaper or Read It Later, starring Google News clusters is a great way to save them for later.
Google News homepage added a new section for Fast Flip, the innovative service from Google Labs that lets you quickly scan news articles. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see a list of the most viewed articles and some articles about popular topics.
"So far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites," explains the Google News blog.
Unlike Google News, which only shows a small snippet from the article, Fast Flip displays a screenshot that includes the first paragraphs of the article. That means Google needs to get permission from each news site before adding it to Fast Flip. If the experiment is successful and Fast Flip makes news articles more discoverable, it could replace Google News image view.
Google Labs launched an interesting service in partnership with New York Times and Washington Post: Living Stories. The goal is to change the way you interact with news online and to read news stories as they unfold.
"Each living story resides at a permanent URL, making it easier to follow the latest updates to the stories that interest you, as well as review deeper background materials that are relevant for a story's context. Living Stories automatically track your interaction with the story, making sure that you are always presented with the news you need, the way you want it. You can read full articles and browse multimedia without ever leaving the Living Story page. Just expand the content you want to see, and minimize it when you're done. Whether you want a short update, deep analysis, feature stories, video, or important quotes, everything related to the story is on the Living Story page."
Google Living Stories aggregates a lot of useful information, but some people might find it overwhelming.
Google News added a directory for custom sections and an easy way to create your own custom sections. Until now, the only way to add a section to Google News was to perform a search and click on "create custom section" at the bottom of the search results page.
Now you can click on "Add a section", find your favorite sections or create new ones.
Google doesn't offer too many options when you create a section: type a list of keywords, restrict the results to a national edition or to the sources from a certain location.
For example, you can create a section for Google-related news by entering [google, gmail, chrome, android] or any other combination of keywords related to Google. You could also create a section about web browsers by entering [browser, chrome, safari, opera browser, firefox, internet explorer].
"Personalized News enables you to get news tailored specifically to your interests. You can personalize your own Google News homepage by creating Custom Sections from your favorite searches and mixing and matching existing standard sections from the regional and language editions of Google News. After defining your Custom Section, you have the option to "Publish this section to the directory" by checking the box provided. This will add your Custom Section to the Custom Section Directory, where other users can add it to their Personalized News page, as well as rate your section," explains Google.
