Google News turns 10 | Hacker News Reader

Google News turns 10

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36 pointsGarbage20 comments

It's a nice summary of news and they've added a few UI tricks, but I can't help but feel like after 10 years it could be much better than it is. The thing still doesn't know who the hell I am. There's no sense that it's clustering me by interest, or news click history. It might be, but I'm still seeing articles on e.g. ATM charges when I don't live in the US. The election stuff is cool since it affects us all, but I really don't need that much daily analysis of it. It's certainly not reflecting my web search history (or Google reader feed list), which should at least be some kind of option.

E.g. put the Curiosity rover stuff near the top. Info about the Patriot's coach...somewhere else. Same with "Aaron Paul Gushes About Fiancee Lauren Parsekian And His Upcoming Wedding." Is there an algo that thought that was vaguely interesting to me, or is Google just shotgunning articles at us all?

Google is older than it feels

Hmm? It feels like Google's been around forever ... the pre-Google past seems almost mythical...

Nah. In fact, AltaVista was fine until they stopped supporting exact phrase searches.

True. AltaVista was certainly good enough for me.

I distinctly remember when someone recommended Google to me. I tried it and was unimpressed. They had a sparse index.html (which has served them well over the years) but other than that, AltaVista was still better. AltaVista was the first real search engine and I still think it was the best.

Not for everybody. I remember it being bloated and easily tricked. SEO in those days was just jamming keywords into the page repeatedly. I also don't remember exact pharase searches.

If AltaVista had been fine, Google wouldn't have grown so easily.

Honestly, the only reason I switched was the interface.

A blank webpage was preferable to all that clutter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altavista-1999.png

Now that you mention it, a side effect of the simple design was that Google was blazingly fast in comparison - not only for the initial page (which could be cached in contrast to altavista which displayed news), but also for the search results

Very true. I don't remember the exact date I switched to Google [1.] but I permanently switched after a single search. It was simply that much better, even at the beginning.

1. I first found out about Google way down deep in a /. thread, probably between hot grits and GNAA troll posts.

I first learnt about google from this post in tasty bits from the technology front: http://tbtf.com/archive/1998-05-11.html#s08

Hard to believe they only had 25 million documents indexed then.

Looks as cluttered as Yahoo does now.

True, AltaVista was my homepage until SEO became so common that 99% of seaches were worthless, if you didn't do a detailed 20 key-word query using clever use of "+"s "-"s and other codes. To try to fight spam yourself, manually.

I also don't remember exact pharase searches.

They existed. I switched to Google immediately after they stopped supporting them. I've spoken with a few people who made the same move for the same reason. Maybe you started using AltaVista after that point?

What I remember was that before Google, I never just used one search engine. I would run my searches through HotBot, Yahoo!, Lycos, and some others (for what it's worth, I always seemed to get the best/most interesting results from HotBot). Dogpile saw that everybody was doing that so their aggregating engine did really well for the few years before Google hit it big.

Dunno, my memory of AltaVista that it (1) seemed amazing when it first showed up (it was, after all, the first), but one quickly realized that it (2) actually sorta sucked: almost every search involved trawling through enormous numbers of search-result pages full of barely relevant results.

Google was a huge, huge, improvement over AltaVista.

There's a good reason they won the search wars.

I think google news needs a really easy way to report sites that don't work. I'd say 10% of the time I'll click through to an article and it will throw a paywall up, or simply redirect me, or tell me the article doesn't exist.

Also I'd love the ability to block certain sources e.g., the wall street journal since I'm not interested in reading the just the first four sentences of the article.

You can block any source you want. I have many sources blocked (ie TechCrunch) and others favorited (ie Verge). Just go to settings.

Where? I clicked the gear icon and there's a section called "adjust sources" but it just has a text box with a plus icon next to it. I tried "adding" wsj.com in the hope I could block it after adding but nothing happens after I click the plus button.

It's a pretty confounding UI really. It makes me feel lost and confused and bad about my life in general ... :-(

When you click the plus button to add a source, it should show a bar bellow it with a slider of how much you want from that source. So you just slide it to the minus side if you never wanna see that, or to the plus side if you wanna see it more often.

If you're not seeing that, maybe something is wrong with your browser, try changing browsers or stopping extensions.

It actually worked today. I guess there was something broken that they fixed. Things are looking up!

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