At the end of last month, Google made its biggest change to the look of Google News since its beta launch in 2002. Yet within the space of two weeks, the company has already made tweaks to its redesign in direct response to feedback from web users.
The biggest change in the new design was the introduction of the “News for you” section. This allowed users to set how interested they are in a variety of subjects from Business, Health and Sports to query specific subjects such as the Supreme Court or synthetic biology.
Users can also control which online news providers they want to see in their Google News. By going to the ‘News Settings’ tab, users can rank sources in order of preference for their individual version of the site.
Additionally, the new Google News design placed increased prominence on stories with sustained click-throughs (indicating more lasting interest than breaking news) in the Spotlight section of the page, as well as new highlighting of Local news developments such as weather updates or local headlines. This feature can be set to monitor any location the user chooses in the settings tab.
Currently available only in the US market, the new design has already been tweaked in response to user feedback.
Yesterday Chris Beckham, product manager for Google News, said that some users had written in to say they missed certain aspects of the old design, particularly the ability to see results grouped by section in two columns.
“At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating so we’ve been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback,” said Beckham. “We’ve given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in ‘News for you’: two column view, which shows the top three stories from each section.”
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