The new Google News is dumbed down, with options removed to sort by date or relevance in some areas, with other options also removed and too much white space delivering a mobile look on a large desktop screen. How can you get some of the old functionality back?
I love Google News. I’ve been using it since it started, and have loved the innovations and changes made to make it a better service throughout the years – until the most recent change in June.
You see, Google has made the new Google News its new thing: make things look like mobile interfaces on screens large enough for far greater information densities, thus giving us copious amounts of needless, wasted white space. For some reason, "white space matters" all of a sudden, with a whole stack of "white space privilege" that Google is delivering.
Not everyone wants to live in the simplified, dum-dum world that Google has engineered for Google News readers, and if you look at online forums, you can see plenty of people hate the new Google News.Here’s one example of the extreme dissatisfaction with the June 2017 change to the new Google News, with the extremely Google-user hostile response that “I’m sorry to say that there’s not a way to revert it back to the previous version right now".
Here is another Google News user rightfully complaining and asking “where is my control over content?”.
It’s weird, because Google was famous for giving its users options and control. Now it's becoming famous for taking user control away.
UPDATE later on 13 August: This Reddit thread shows that you can change your user agent in your browser to the Opera browser, and this wil give you the old Google News interface back. I did this on Safari, and... it worked!
In Safari, you click on the word "Safari" at the top left of your screen.
Then from the drop down menu that appears, click on “Preferences”.
When that box appears, click on the “Advanced” tab at the top right hand corner of the Preferences box.
At the bottom of the Advanced tab, put a tick in the box that lists “Show Develop menu in menu bar”.
When you close this box, you’ll see a new Develop menu in between “Bookmarks” and “Window” at the top of the screen.
Click “Develop”, then “User Agent”, then “Other”.
In the box that appears, delete what’s there and paste in:
Opera/9.80 (S60; SymbOS; Opera Mobi/499; U; ru) Presto/2.4.18 Version/10.00
Then click OK and load news.google.com – and the old Google News is back!
Don’t know how long it will last, but it’s worth a shot. You will have to set your user agent back to Opera when you want to surf Google News, but don’t close the tab and you’ll be fine for quite some time.
The Reddit page says you can use the following user agent as well:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; HTC; Windows Phone 8X by HTC)
This Reddit page has links on how to effect this change on Firefox and Chrome. Good luck! Story continues below.
But in the new modern world of where you’ll get what you’re given and you’ll be happy about it, we users have discovered that Google and others don’t care about helping us learn to think for ourselves, they just want to tell us how to think by spoon-feeding us new formats with no way of going back to what we’ve been using and loving for years.
Google was also famous for allowing users to go back to the previous interface for things like Gmail and other products, but when it came to news, there was a newsflash: you’re stuck with what we give you, buddy, and if you don’t like it, you’re welcome to try Bing News instead. Or something like that.
For me, I liked some of the controls that Google News once offered so I could re-order news stories by most relevant, or by date, and while some Google News categories that you go into more depth in allow that, if you simply search for news, you can’t get that option any more. It's like our choice of diversity in news and options is b
0 Comments