Revamped Google News puts premium on trust
MOUNTAINVIEW(CALIFORNIA): In a bid to strengthen quality journalism and provide news from trusted sources, Google Inc. announced a relaunch of its news app. Google News, the revamped app, was announced by CEO Sundar Pichai at the company’s annual Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California on Tuesday.
Pichai emphasised that the need of the hour was to support quality journalism, saying that news was foundational to the way democracies work. “People turn to Google in times of need for news so we have re-imagined the news product using AI to get quality sources for news,” he said.
The original Google News was built about 15 years ago, but over this period there has been a proliferation of content on the internet that makes it difficult for users to distinguish between news from reliable sources.
Users want to know what’s going on quickly, then there is a desire to go deeper on a few stories and really dig in beyond the headlines. Finally, the new app will also help the publishing industry that is under a lot of stress because of new monetisation models so we wanted to embed this within our app,” explained Trystan Upstill, distinguished engineer, Google News Engineering and Product Lead in a round table later in the day.
The new Google News experience begins with a “For You” section that has a briefing of five top stories Google has pulled for you. This is a mix of global headlines, local news that will be personalised based on user location, and new developments on stories you’ve been following.
The app will also have a unique visual format called newscasts, which uses the latest developments in natural language to bring together a collection of articles, videos and quotes on a single topic. The new immersive experience will make it easy for people to learn more about a story.
Finally, to understand a story completely, the app has a “Full Coverage” tab which will let users see how that story is reported from a variety of sources and in multiple formats like videos and local news report.