Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia content more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to manually expand them.
"The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don't use and have a more streamlined experience," explains Google.
By default, Google uses the single column view, but you can switch to the two column view with the added benefit of going back to the old interface. Here's the new interface:
... and the classic interface:
The redesigned UI shows a single news article instead of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it's strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, has recently said, the service "groups news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place".
Power users can try Google's keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will rarely expand stories and only click the main news article.
Barry Schwartz spotted some new options that let you personalize Google News. If you go to the Google News settings page, you can tweak Google News to show fewer press releases, more blog posts or even hide all the blog posts and press releases. "The neat part of the control of how you see blog and press release results is that there is a lever. You can pick from None to Fewer to Normal to More. Everyone by default is set to normal," says Barry Schwartz.
You can also disable the automatic refresh of the Google News homepage. By default, Google reloads the page every 15 minutes.
I tried to hide all the blog posts and press releases, but this only worked for search results. Google News sections still included blog posts and press releases:
Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers, but not many websites optimize their interface for Opera Mini. Most Google services have two mobile interfaces: a basic WAP interface and a more advanced interface for smartphones. Opera Mini always displays the basic interface because the browser is actually a thin client that can't handle web apps properly. Fortunately, there's an exception to this rule: Google News shows the smartphone interface in Opera Mini.
"While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we've also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser. So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone," informs Google.
Google's blog post ignores that Opera Mini is also available for iOS, Android, Symbian and other mobile operating systems, so it's not just a browser for feature phones. Opera Mini is really useful while roaming, for slow Internet connections and for data capped mobile contracts. Hopefully, Google News won't be the only Google service optimized for Opera Mini and Google services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums will fully support Opera's desktop browser.
Google News has a new section that lists the most shared articles. It's not clear if Google counts the number of people who used the sharing feature from Google News or tracks the references from Twitter and other social sites, but Google's chart is not very reliable. When I started to write this post, the most popular news article was a story about Google's Groupon acquisition that has been shared by 2,189 people.
15 minutes later, the most popular article was a NASA press release shared by 10,893 people.
Google News continues to integrate with Twitter and other microblogging services. After testing a section that shows newsworthy tweets from your subscription, Google started to add to the Google News Onebox the number of times a story has been shared.
For example, Google's Onebox shows that this article about Google TV has been shared by more than 50 Twitter users. Google links to the realtime results for this article, but the page only includes 10 results.
"Friends is an experimental section in the side column that helps you find news articles that your friends are sharing on Twitter. In the open text box, enter your Twitter username and click "Save." Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow. Please note that Friends only shows you articles that can be found in Google News. If someone you follow has shared an article or a link that cannot be found in Google News, then you will not see that update in the Friends section."
Maybe in the future Google News will use your Twitter timeline to customize the list of news articles displayed on the homepage or to annotate news clusters.
After many months of testing, Google News redesigned the homepage and made it more customizable. One of the most important changes is that each group of related news has a topic ("Mobile industry", "Toyota", "Tropical storm Alex") and you can easily subscribe to the topic.
Google News has a new section called "News for you" whose goal is to show news about your interests. You can add custom news topics, select how often you read news about each topic and choose if you want to see the news grouped in sections or as an uninterrupted stream.
If you like some news site or dislike news sources that provide biased or irrelevant news, you can now personalize Google News and list your preferences. Click on "Settings" at the top of the page, select "News settings" and start typing the sites you'd like to see more often or less often in Google News.
"Sources you promote or demote will be ranked differently for you (but not for anyone else) in your Google News search results and in the stories that you browse on the News homepage and other sections. Please keep in mind that demoted sources may not entirely disappear for you in Google News, and promoted sources may not appear in all of the stories you see," mentions Google.
Each news cluster has a small menu that lets you share stories on social sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader) or by email.
Google News also added keyboard shortcuts that are available in other Google applications like Gmail and Google Reader: j or n (next story), k or p (previous story), / (search), s (star), . or f (share), Enter (open the headline article for the current story). Unfortunately, keyboard shortcuts are an afterthought, so you'll find many flaws: after selecting the "Email" option, you need to use your mouse to click on the "To" field; after opening the main article of a story and going back to Google News, the story is no longer selected.
"The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We're making the ability to choose which sources you'll see more or less often available in all English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon," explains Google.
Google has a special page that provides more information about the new features and another page that shows you where are the old features and which features are new.
Google News is now more customizable and has a lot of features that should appeal to Google Reader users. You can't subscribe to news sites, but you can subscribe to topics and list your favorite news sites. Google News lets you star and share each story, navigate using keyboard shortcuts and read news recommended for you. Google News has suddenly morphed from a news aggregator into a news reader, from a website to a web application.
