Google has declared (via a tweet) that it is embarking on a significant redesign of the Google.com News tab (this is the news tab found on Google.com, rather than the Google News product found at news.google.com). In the tweet Google states: “Over the next couple weeks we’re rolling out a redesigned News tab in Search on desktop. The refreshed design makes publisher names more prominent and organizes articles more clearly to help you find the news you need. Check it out.”
The upgrade, as The Verge notes, will also include greater transparency about the sources of news, which is considered important by many readers in relation to fake news and with some types of media being more reliable than others (or at least having particulate political leanings). For example, the NewsGuard plug-in rates the Daily Mail as untrustworthy and Fox News as too politically biased for certain stories to be credible, as examples. To address the transparency issue, the Google.com News tab will organize articles in a card-style layout, while also better emphasizing publisher names.
TechCrunch has seen a preview of the re-design and reports how news articles are now organized in a compact list of links, allowing the user to see several headlines around a single topic in one space. TechCrunch calls the design “a bit old-school”; however they also single out its simplicity, noting “but it works.”
In terms of style, the article headlines are in blue, the publisher is presented in green and the articles are labeled as “In-depth” or “Opinion”. Photographic thumbnails are only located with the lead story. A further stylistic change is that the user will see far fewer results on the screen before they need to scroll down the page. Smaller news outlets may not be happy with the change, since fewer articles will be displayed on the first screen, leading to a potential drop in traffic.
The re-vamped News tab will be rolling out to users globally in the coming weeks.
