The Google News tab is receiving a makeover. Google announced this week, through a tweet, a significant redesign of the Google.com News tab on the desktop. You will organize the items in a card style design, while emphasizing the names of the editors. The final result makes Google News more aesthetic, but at the expense of the density of information.
To be clear, the changes here focus on the News tab of Google.com, not the dedicated Google News product at news.google.com. You'll access the News tab when you search for a term on Google.com, and then click on "News" to see the most recent coverage instead of the Google search results list.
As the preview of the redesign shows, news articles are currently organized into a compact list of links. Allowing you to see several headlines around a single topic with just a glance. This design, it is true, is a bit old-fashioned, but it works.
Within the stack of links, the headline is blue, the editor is green, and the articles are labeled "In depth" or "Opinion", when appropriate. There are small thumbnails of photos for the main story, with links to other editors below that appear as text only.
What Google News design brings
The updated design is more readable as items are spaced and placed on cards, similar to the main Google News product. There is also more blank space and longer previews of each story.
But the change means that you are seeing far fewer results on the screen before you have to scroll down.
The updated News tab makes it more obvious where the news comes from, because the names of the editors receive more prominence. They also receive your logo next to the headline, so it is easier to identify your favorite news outlets at a glance. This recalls the recent redesign of the mobile for Google Search, which also caught the attention of the editors by placing them at the top of a link next to their logo.
In addition to providing you with a set of news search results, the redesigned tab includes a new carousel called "People also searched for" that tells you other relevant news based on your search query.
Not everyone is excited about the update, as it makes it more difficult to quickly scan several headlines at once. And since there are fewer articles from the editors on the first screen, traffic to those "below the fold" is likely to decrease.
Google says the changes will come true in the coming weeks.