

Why the New Google News Sucks - wazoox
http://www.asktog.com/columns/084Top10GoogleNewsSucks.html

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CapitalistCartr
"The United States of America has the oldest government in the world."

That's sure not true. Iceland holds that distinction. Google News might have
screwed up their layout, but Google is still helpful for fact checking before
publishing.

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hugh3
That's not a matter of fact, that's a matter of semantics. Checking up on your
fact, I find that the Althingi was founded in 930 but suspended in 1789 and
Iceland was ruled by Denmark until 1918, so that doesn't sound very
continuous.

England has had a (Cromwell aside) unbroken series of monarchs since 1066,
does that count?

Still, the US should get some kind of old-government distinction since it's
had absolutely uninterrupted constitutional democracy on all levels since
Washington's time. (At least in the states that didn't secede.)

~~~
waqf
The author had to mention England explicitly in order to give an excuse for
why it didn't count. (I would be interested to learn when this supposed
"transition from monarchy to democracy" took place. 1215? 1689?)

Yes, that was the paragraph that lost me all respect for the article.

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cdr
I changed my "edition" to Canada, as that's apparently the only way to avoid
the new design. Hopefully it takes them a very long time to push the new
design to other editions.

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Hoff
I stopped visiting both Google News and BBC News because of their respective
and recent UI degradations; the former because I can't find anything and the
latter because I can't find what I used to.

Both web sites have been replaced with the Reuters and BBC News iOS apps.

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wazoox
As he mentioned, the international versions of Google news still use the
traditional layout. It's not hard to find it incredibly better...

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billjings
Check out the political rant masquerading as #1.

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wazoox
He doesn't masquerade anything; it states that the new layout isn't as
politically neutral as the old one, and affirms it to be a bad thing, which is
hard to argue against given the sad state of politics in the US.

~~~
billjings
Well, right or wrong, it was a little out of left field in the midst of an
extended design critique. And saying it was "a force in stabilizing the United
States of America" is a little bit overblown.

~~~
protomyth
I agree with you about the overblown part, but I do think it has a part in a
design article. The selection of information is an important factor in the
final output from a design perspective. Design is not just look and layout
without consideration of content and content selection.

That being said, I kinda like being able to exclude certain sources, but
mostly for a different reason then to create and echo chamber. I like
excluding sites that have poor viewing experience.

