Earlier this week Google News not only announced the revamp of its homepage but also the updates to its story pages.
The new style homepage consists of new coloured banners to segment each different type of news story, such as the top stories, health stories and entertainment stories.
They have also added YouTube logos to the relevant video results to help users distinguish which videos are a result from their partners site and which are not:
The section pages have also been updated to contain videos and images from their partners and also to include popular news stories, found on the right hand side below the videos and images.
The story pages have also been renovated and are found by clicking the “all 365 news articles>>”, for example, that it located under every snippet found in the clusters of news stories in the Google News pages.
This link now takes the user to more articles that have been written about the particular event or “story”, as the Google News team like to refer to it.
The story page found by clicking this link, now contains coverage of the particular event from a range of different sources found around the web, including top articles, quotes from people in the story and posts from news blogs.
There can also be videos, images and articles from sources based near the story found on the page, along with a timeline that illustrates the level of media coverage over time.
For example on this story page about the war in Sri Lanka there is a timeline of the right hand side that shows the number of sources covering the story over the a short period of time.
It also highlights the main headlines that have been written across that period of time and exactly when they were covered by labelling each with different letters and referencing the stories underneath.
In some cases users can also expect to see images and videos down the right hand side of the page, under the timeline feature that show pictures and short video clips that are connected to that particular story / event.
As with all Google results pages users can see the full story highlighted in each snippet by clicking on the result and will be taken to the original source, where the full story can be found.
All these changes have been implemented to broaden the range of sources available and to increase the ways in which users can experience the news on Google.
