The Google News Search Box

The Google News homepage uses a special search box with a few interesting features. Google only shows a list of suggestions and doesn't use Google Instant, even if this feature is available for the Google News results pages. The last suggestion lets you search the web and you can use the up arrow key to select it or just press Shift+Enter. A similar feature is available in Gmail, but you can't use the Shift+Enter shortcut.

When Google redesigned Google News and other services, the "Web Search" button seemed extraneous and it was removed.

Updated Interface for Google News

Google News is the latest Google service that gets a new design consistent with Google+. There's a new color scheme, more white space, a new header and two buttons that replace the customization links.

It's strange to see the label-less blue search button next to the "search the Web" button. Gmail's new interface uses two buttons that are easier to differentiate, instead of confusing users. There's a lot of wasted space at the top of the page and the two new buttons are too prominent, especially if you consider that you'll not use them very often.


In a recent Google+ post, Larry Page said that Google has launched a "beautiful, consistent and simpler design". He continued: "Google+ is also a great example of another focus of mine - beautiful products that are simple and intuitive to use and was actually was one of the first products to contain our new visual redesign." A New York Times blog post quotes Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO, who concludes that "there was just too much clutter. Larry in the last 90 days basically said, 'Hey, it's just time to re-shift. Don't lose any insights into the deep engineering that we drive, but let's make sure we don't lose focus on the ease of use."

{ Thanks, Anthony. }

Google News Badges

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. "The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends," informs Google.


Google created more than 500 badges, so it's very likely that you'll collect at least one of them if you visit Google News frequently. Badges reward people that constantly read articles on a certain topic, so you're more likely to receive a badge if you read 3-4 articles a day about Google than if you read 10 articles about Google every 3-4 days.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. "Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are," suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It's one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

Badges also help you find your favorite Google News topics and add customized sections to the homepage. Google News now uses sliders to let you fine tune your personalized hompepage.

If you don't like badges, there's an option in the Google News settings page that lets you disable this feature.

{ Thanks, Jason. }

A New Interface for Google News: No Clusters, No Clutter

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.

More Google News Settings

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:

Better Google News in Opera Mini

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.