With a new design and new features, there’s a lot to cover in the new Google News app. Let’s look at each tab and a new feature that aims to give users unbiased news on a given topic.
The Full Coverage button is found in the Briefing feed, and at the top of news stories you’ve opened. Google’s Full Coverage section is free of any artificial intelligence or machine learning.
The newsstand section is used to list various news outlets and publications and provide the option to subscribe to the respective services.
Feed is populated with content related to a user’s interests, determined both by interactions made with Google and explicit commands to follow a topic. These are displayed on cards and feature stories or other information.
One key way in which Feed aims to differentiate itself from the competition is how it determines relevancy. Facebook and Twitter are designed to focus on stories that are the most recent and organize users’ feeds accordingly
Google also talked about its improved job search product. The feed can also use this algorithm to show videos and events.
Google will be using the feed to shape how people absorb news. Instead of just tossing a news article into the feed as a standalone entity.
There’s a new visual format called newscasts, which uses natural language understanding to give you a collection of articles, videos, and quotes on a single topic.
That feature is precisely what Google hopes attracts news junkies to its app, at the expense of Facebook, Flipboard, and others. The news feed replaces the old Google Now tool, which also delivered personalized information with regards to weather, traffic, sports, and other things.
According to THE VERGE, very little of that context was on display in Google’s presentation today, which focused on the positive instead. Ahead of the announcement, Google search chief Ben Gomes laid out some of the history of how search works and the principles that guide Google’s product development. Pointing out Google’s advances in word matching, synonyms, and the Knowledge Graph, Gomes emphasized how Google is constantly trying to advance search’s understanding of what words mean.