As a follow-on from Google’s Digital Wellbeing initiatives at the Google IO 2018 keynote today the new changes Google has in store for Google News were outlined.
At the core of the new Google News is their commitment to improve news — no more fake news. Google have committed $300 million over the next three years to improve the news we see. They plan to work with journalists and publishers to create products and programs that will help the industry. All of this will be incorporated into the new Google News.
Google News began life as a 20% product of a Googler after 9-11. The new Google News is totally redesigned to use AI to bring to the forefront the best of what journalism has to offer to give users a deeper insight and a a deeper understanding and perspective of any and all topics they are interested in. This will all be from quality sources that users can trust.
Google set out with the new Google News to help users do three things:
- Keep up with the news you care about
- Understand the full story
- Enjoy and support the sources you love
Google News is making it easier for the user to keep up with the news they care about by at first giving you a briefing of the top five stories that you need to know right now followed by stories selected just for you, based on your previous internet actions. Google News uses AI to assemble the key articles and news you need to know as well as bringing in local news. As with most of Google’s products there is reinforcement learning within the app so it learns what you like and don’t like and it’s suggestions become better and more accurate the more you use the app.
Google have also made the News app a lot more multi-media friendly with large imagery and some great video and podcast experiences. It will bring you all the best video news from YouTube and around the Web and is designed to “let the stories speak for themselves”. This is all enhanced by the new Google Material Theme “uniquely tailored by Google”.
As part of Google News Google are introducing a new digital format they call Newscasts. Newscasts are a “preview of the story” and help you to get a feel for what is going on. Using the latest developments in natural language understanding they bring together relative news to give you a quick overview and help you to decide whether you want to dive in more deeply.
The second goal for Google news is to help users see and understand the full story of the news/topic. It will give a Full Coverage from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats to build a complete picture and timeline of what’s happening in an event. It pulls out FAQs and finds answers for you to provide a “real-time understanding”. Sources will include Twitter and trusted news sources and will all be fact-checked. This coverage is assembled using what Google call Temporal Co-locality.
Within the new Google News Google are making changes to the Newstand section. They are making it easy to find and follow sources and publishers that you love and at the same time helping you to discover new ones including over 1000 titles. Using “Subscribe with Google” it is now simple to sign into all these sites to deliver “high quality news where it matters most”.
The new Google News will be rolling out in 127 countries on Android, iOS and the web starting today — everyone will have it by next week. Head to the Play Store and grab the app now so that you will have the updated new app as soon as it is available.
