
Google News to be revamped, incorporate YouTube videos and magazines - Jaruzel
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/google-news-to-be-revamped-incorporate-youtube-videos-and-magazines/
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djflutt3rshy
One of the reasons I quit using Google News is the prevalence of "articles" in
the Sci/Tech and Health sections giving me all the latest news about how the
globe-alists are keeping Planet Nibiru a secret, and why doctors hate this ONE
single trick to cure cancer. Unless it's very carefully curated, adding
YouTube videos to the mix seems like it'd aggravate this problem.

~~~
ebbv
Exactly why I stopped using google news. Garbage sites started getting thier
garbage articles into my feed constantly and it was an annoying battle to keep
them out. Seems obvious and easy to fix, but in true google fashion they will
probably only make it worse.

~~~
danmaz74
> Seems obvious and easy to fix

Is it?

~~~
abenedic
There is usually a pattern used by clickbait articles, and psuedoscientific
ones tend to use unusual words(e.g. quantum, toxin, etc.) far more regularly.
Also the entire site tends to be bad, so google could index a list of poor
quality news sites. Isn't that a little bit their job for ranking sites?

~~~
danmaz74
It is their job, but, looking at what happens with SEO - the never ending cat-
and-mouse game where "black hats" always adapt to the new countermeasures
Google puts in place - I wouldn't say it's all that easy :)

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wscott
I hope I can opt out of video. It is bad enough that most the news sites will
autoplay videos when you go there.

Hmmm, they add code to Chrome to avoid those videos and now they are going to
add their own.

~~~
johnloeber
In Chrome and Firefox, you can turn off video autoplay at the browser level.
It’s a config option.

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AJ007
This could be a great opportunity for another news site, like when they fucked
up Google Finance
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Google%20finance,Yahoo%20finance)

~~~
vntok
Interesting. What did they do to fuck it up?

~~~
fragsworth
They removed all of the most useful and important features and dumbed it down
significantly.

It had a resizable graph, with the ability to quickly compare two or more
ticker symbols, and news icons _right on_ the graph that showed significant
events for the company.

It also had a great customizable table to manage your own portfolio, and a ton
of data that mostly seems to be missing now.

It was the best free finance tool available in the world, by far. Now it's
just another piece of garbage like any random finance website.

~~~
kbrosnan
Note that all the great features were implemented in Flash. The cost of
documenting the behaviors and building a team to reimplement was deemed non-
essential.

~~~
EpicEng
>all the great features... deemed non-essential.

Sounds like a winning strategy.

~~~
kbrosnan
Google's actions made it clear that Google Finance has been an unowned or
skeleton project for several years. Google never made a Google Finance app for
Android. Just because there is a vocal audience that likes the old product
does not mean that reimplementing the flash features is a good use of
resources.

~~~
AnssiH
They did have a Finance app, but they dropped it from Play Store in 2015 after
not updating it for years.

[https://www.androidpolice.com/2015/04/01/google-quietly-
remo...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2015/04/01/google-quietly-removes-its-
finance-app-from-the-play-store/)

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dragonwriter
This would be tolerable if there was a preference to disable all video
content, but otherwise this is going to be a strong push for me to find a
different aggregator: when I go to Google News I'm looking specifically for
text-base news 100% of the time; video is a poor medium for information and an
excellent one for emotional manipulation.

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chmars
I hope that search options will become available again. With the last revamp,
Google removed the option to get all results in chronological order.

~~~
monetus
It really blows my mind how they actively make search worse with things like
that.

~~~
Pica_soO
Its cooperate politics panicking due to the failing of some cobbled together
success metric. One of the holy cash cows of the company is inserted into the
new product using all the previously gained knowledge- on how to herd holy
cows, usually damaging the new product beyond repair.

It fails, the ruin is abandoned and sold off as scrap, and this top down
approach to product development is taken as further evidence that the internal
innovation culture is deteriorating. Instead, some external company doing a
"superficial similar feature" is bought to overcome the perceived deficit.
This fails to integrate due to cooperate cultural clashes and architectural
differences.

Who would have thought that something like google could be turned into another
flailing behemoth, whose management is incapable of seeing potential anywhere
besides its core product and the glorious past.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC)
Remember microsofts attempts to cram Windows into everything? Which ironically
turned around only after, anything (platform cellphone) was allowed to adapt
the holy cash cow to its needs.

Lets take something like Googles AR-Core. If it would show great potential, it
will be honored to integrate search into it. And how will that happen? Like
search always happened. As a clumsy text-entry or as voice search.

First approach deteriorates the platform (there is no useful keyboard)- second
adds no additional value but at least would work.

Truth is, to be successful the core cash cow ("search") would have to adapt to
the needs of the new platform. Imagine a NN-net guessing correctly- after you
gestured a question mark - not only which trackable you pointed towards, but
what the context was and deliver search results situation aware results and
suggestions.

Such innovation would force changes upon search- and thus surely would face
fierce resistance.

Edit: I apologize for the previous version to any readers. I should stop
coding and commenting parallel.

~~~
fragsworth
You really need to use grammar/spelling correction. Your text is incredibly
frustrating to read.

~~~
Pica_soO
You are right, sorry, i tried to correct the text. It definitely was a hot
mess

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amorphid
When I want to search Google for news, I do a regular seearch, and then click
over to the news link, which displays the results in a much easier to consume
formant that the regular Google News UI.

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shadowtree
What is going on at the Google design team?

The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations.
Finance, Calendar, Mail ... all getting new UIs, and all of them are worse.

Giant whitespace, low information density, a sluggish webapp feel,...just what
is going on?

The new GMail struggles to keep up with clicks in any browser - while the
previous version was snappy. How on earth is this possible?

~~~
foepys
> How on earth is this possible?

I'd put some huge blame on single page applications. Nearly everywhere stuff
gets replaced by SPAs to push all layout calculations to the client. This
frees up resources on the server side but at the same time everything feels
sluggish and takes a long time to load (network- and Javascript-wise).

Reddit is also taking this new approach and as a result is nearly unusable on
my phone and takes 3 times a long to load on my desktop.

The layout is becoming mobile first due to everything needing to be
"responsive". So the desktop as the minority webbrowsing platform gets to use
all the interfaces that are primarily optimized for mobile.

~~~
9a5351b7-c78e
They're doing the SPA wrong.

~~~
rsynnott
Does anyone do it right? Gmail used to be a rare example of a non-dreadful SPA
app, but I gather the new one is pretty bad (I’m still on the old interface
for now). Beyond that, I can’t think of many.

The dreadful new Jira is a good example; much, much slower than the old one,
less information dense, and more confusing.

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Bahamut
The last thing I want when I browse news is for video to be incorporated. It's
already bad enough seeing video only articles on Google News on occasion. This
will probably push me to switching to Apple News for mobile.

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jgh
Well I’m not sure how they can make it worse than they already have but I’m
ready to be surprised.

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jbafk
I hope the EU has something to say about this.

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schwank
I was already unhappy with Amp and the last redesign. I have used GNews more
than most other sites in the past but it's already gotten pretty bad. Add in
YouTube and I'm done. Really could use a new aggregator... Will have to check
out the newstral.com site linked in another post here. Any other options?

