Last week, Google announced that they were relaunching Google News in a better format with enhanced customization, discovery and sharing. The redesign was the biggest change since the launch in beta in 2002.
The feedback was good, but some folks wanted parts of the old Google News back.
Some of you told us that you really liked it, especially how the "News for you" section lets you see a stream of articles tailored to the interests you specify. The positive usage data we saw during our months-long tests of the redesign has continued since we introduced it to all users of the U.S. English edition, and hundreds of thousands of you have already customized your Google News homepages. But some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns.
In the blog post about the news, Google talked about making the tweaks because of user feedback, a policy they seem to employ across all of their services, i.e. give the people what they want.
This strategy is what blogging and news consumption is all about, especially in a content centric world that wants their news tailored all the time. Being forced fed news isn't attractive anymore. Consumers expect add-ons and personalization.
They want news that matters to their lives, concerns, political beliefs, causes, etc. It's as if the news business finally has a customer service component to it where it's more like a five star restaurant and you're ordering off the menu versus ordering what the chef wants to make you.
That's the media world we live in and it's only going to get more customized as time constraints on our consumption get tighter and tighter.