Some people have spotted a new design for Google News, which is part of a limited test experiment Google is running. A Google employee posted the following message in the Google News Help Forum:

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html

We’d love to hear your feedback. Please let us know what you think at:

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_news&source=redesign

Regards,

The Google News Team

At this point, there don’t seem to be any screenshots of this design floating around, so maybe someone that is actually seeing the different version will post one eventually. There are descriptions out there, however.

The design has been described as focusing on a single category of news at a time. The user has to click on a different category to view that, as opposed to the current design where many categories are featured on the home page and arranged according to the user’s preference.  It doesn’t seem like the feedback of those who have used the different Google News design has been pretty positive. (Hat Tip: Barry Schwartz)

Google recently did add a feature to the mainstream version of Google News, which allows users to star news clusters, so they can follow up with them later.

Would you prefer Google News to focus on a single news category at a time? Share your thoughts.
 

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