A year after its big redesign, how Google News is thinking about the best ways to present news stories
It’s been a year since Google News launched its big redesign, the first major update of the Google News interface since it launched in 2002. The revamp put a new emphasis on customized news content, focusing in particular on the social elements of news: personalization and, then, sharing.
The design you’ll see on the site today isn’t too far off from what was introduced last year. It still strikes a balance between personalization and serendipity, with a design that is dominated by a Top Stories stream, and filled out by customized stories, locally relevant articles, Spotlight-ed items, most-shared pieces, and other content.
But there have been tweaks, too, many of them aimed at writing into the service a happy medium within the polar aspects of news consumption: something between total personalization and total universality; between breadth and depth; between pre-existing interests and discovery; between want to know and need to know; between expectation and serendipity.