
Google News turns 10 - Garbage
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-news-turns-10.html
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richardw
It's a nice summary of news and they've added a few UI tricks, but I can't
help but feel like after 10 years it could be much better than it is. The
thing still doesn't know who the hell I am. There's no sense that it's
clustering me by interest, or news click history. It might be, but I'm still
seeing articles on e.g. ATM charges when I don't live in the US. The election
stuff is cool since it affects us all, but I really don't need _that_ much
daily analysis of it. It's certainly not reflecting my web search history (or
Google reader feed list), which should at least be some kind of option.

E.g. put the Curiosity rover stuff near the top. Info about the Patriot's
coach...somewhere else. Same with "Aaron Paul Gushes About Fiancee Lauren
Parsekian And His Upcoming Wedding." Is there an algo that thought that was
vaguely interesting to me, or is Google just shotgunning articles at us all?

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randartie
Google is older than it feels

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snogglethorpe
Hmm? It feels like Google's been around _forever_ ... the pre-Google past
seems almost mythical...

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WalterGR
Nah. In fact, AltaVista was fine until they stopped supporting exact phrase
searches.

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VMG
Not for everybody. I remember it being bloated and easily tricked. SEO in
those days was just jamming keywords into the page repeatedly. I also don't
remember exact pharase searches.

If AltaVista had been fine, Google wouldn't have grown so easily.

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s_henry_paulson
Honestly, the only reason I switched was the interface.

A blank webpage was preferable to all that clutter:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altavista-1999.png>

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joeyo
Very true. I don't remember the exact date I switched to Google [1.] but I
permanently switched after a single search. It was simply that much better,
even at the beginning.

1\. I first found out about Google way down deep in a /. thread, probably
between hot grits and GNAA troll posts.

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doublec
I first learnt about google from this post in tasty bits from the technology
front: <http://tbtf.com/archive/1998-05-11.html#s08>

Hard to believe they only had 25 million documents indexed then.

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tocomment
I think google news needs a really easy way to report sites that don't work.
I'd say 10% of the time I'll click through to an article and it will throw a
paywall up, or simply redirect me, or tell me the article doesn't exist.

Also I'd love the ability to block certain sources e.g., the wall street
journal since I'm not interested in reading the just the first four sentences
of the article.

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vibrunazo
You can block any source you want. I have many sources blocked (ie TechCrunch)
and others favorited (ie Verge). Just go to settings.

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tocomment
Where? I clicked the gear icon and there's a section called "adjust sources"
but it just has a text box with a plus icon next to it. I tried "adding"
wsj.com in the hope I could block it after adding but nothing happens after I
click the plus button.

It's a pretty confounding UI really. It makes me feel lost and confused and
bad about my life in general ... :-(

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vibrunazo
When you click the plus button to add a source, it should show a bar bellow it
with a slider of how much you want from that source. So you just slide it to
the minus side if you never wanna see that, or to the plus side if you wanna
see it more often.

If you're not seeing that, maybe something is wrong with your browser, try
changing browsers or stopping extensions.

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tocomment
It actually worked today. I guess there was something broken that they fixed.
Things are looking up!

