Google News announced several changes to the interface yesterday. This comes after several updates in the past years to the Google News design.
The latest update is pretty drastic in that only the top story shows news clusters, while the rest only show that cluster when you click in the news box.
Here is a video of how it works:
The new features include:
- Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
- Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
- Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
- Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
- Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.
What Google did not announce on the blog was the method of blocking press releases and blogs from the results you see on Google News.
Dislike it? You can opt out of this feature by selecting “Two Column” if you prefer to browse Google News via the standard story boxes. Only the U.S. edition sees this in the "One Column" view.
Forum discussion at Google News Help and WebmasterWorld.
