Mountain View, California — Global search engine behemoth Google has done a lot in the past to make Google News more personalized and constantly strives to stay fresh in age of social media age. For the past few months, the company has been engaged in testing new news layouts in the wild, and over the weekend announced that the home page is now more personalized for those who are logged in and a recommended sections to the service.
Frankly speaking, these days, this is no easy feat, as social media and blogs have tremendously changed the face of news, and there is simply way more information of interest to readers than there is time enough to read. With such a speedy flow of information growing each passing day, people want the news that matters most to them, while at the same time not missing anything important.
Now keeping in context, the search engine titan has added two new sections, one named “News for You” and the other a side widget named “Recommended Sections.”
Now onwards, you will find stores recommended to you based on the articles you have shown an interest in before. If you are logged into your Google account, you will now be able to see “News for You” under the three “Top Stories” area in the US.
The “News For You” section will now deliver stories that are personalized and recommended for users based on their behavior on the site.
These articles come in the “News for You” section, and extracts from stories based on your news-related web history. “For instance, if you click on a lot of articles related to baseball, we will make sure that you get a chance to see breaking baseball stories,” explains Google News software engineer Lucian Cionca. “We discovered while testing that more users clicked on more stories when we added this automatic personalization, sending more traffic to publishers.”
Basically, Google is well aware of what you search for and click on, and it will customize the content within that section for news that you tend to click on more. Besides, there are also various options for viewing these articles in different formats.
Of course, not everyone wants to be served news based on their web history. Thus, if it is a nagging issue, then you can easily turn it off. Simply click the link that says “Standard U.S. Edition” at the bottom of Google News.
“This will not delete any of your News settings or Web History,” notes Cionca. “It will switch you to an unpersonalized version of Google News for the duration of your current session.”
Additionally, you can always delete your web history or log out of your Google account too.
Google has also bundled a “Recommended Sections” feature located on the sidebar that suggests topics that you can add to your custom sections. This seems to just be encouraging users to use the custom sections feature more.
Moreover, just last year, Google added a new News Follow feature, that enable users to easily follow topics as they search in Google News. The site then unleashed a big redesign last summer, with more emphasis on personalization.
“There is an old saying that all news is local,” said Google’s Kevin Stolt. “But all news is personal too–we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors.”
Furthermore, the latest update is released barely nine months after Google first introduced a set of personalization features to the news aggregator as part of a major redesign.
Note: These features are only available to English-language U.S. edition of Google News only.
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