Google Blogoscoped

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Google News Adds Most Popular, Recommended

Google News has two new sections to the left; Recommended, and Most Popular. It’s interesting to see Google work on improving their news homepage, even though its lack of ads make it a site with no direct revenues.

Most Popular

How does the Most Popular feature work? As opposed to the Google News homepage, which shows the top stories being published by editors on different news sites, this new category will allow you to see what’s most popular with readers of Google News. In a certain way, it’s Digg for Google News.

At the moment, the most popular news story on Google is “Kelly Clarkson settles ’Idol’ dispute.”

Recommended

The Recommended section will show news which may be of importance to you based on which stories you clicked on before. So, if you’re interested in the search industry and you often click on news items related to search (while being signed in to your Google Account), this page may show you more fresh search news over time. “Simply put, we recommend news stories to you that have been read by many other users who’ve also read similar stories as you in the past,” Google states on their help page.

Note the recommended page doesn’t always work. Several times, it showed me “Please try again shortly. We apologize that this page is currently unavailable.”

When you check your Google News homepage – and you’re logged in – you can now also see a “Recommended for ...” section below the top stories. For example, my top recommendation at the moment is “Google in court over refusal to let US examine search requests.”

Already, Google News allows you to personalize your homepage, but this is a step further as it allows you to be even lazier (you don’t need to configure your preferences).

[Thanks PacificDave in the forum.]

Update: You need to activate the Personalized Search history to see the “Recommended” category. Log in to your Google Account, go to Google.com, click on “Search History”, and in your settings (the yellow box on top) click “Resume.”

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