I now use mainly CNN but occasionally Reuters as well. My take is that Google did not adequately supervise this "team" of development gurus who may be very smart but have no business sense whatsoever.

Now they are arrogantly refusing to admit their blunder. However I'll wager the click thru traffic data tells the story if someone were to find it.

But this is a royal disappointing fail on their part. Whatever happened to focusing on the user experience??

They are acting as if they can care less right now.

I have changed my home page and now get my news from elsewhere.

Who at google thought it was in my best interest to have so much real estate taken up without even asking me? First, do no harm? Does that include giving users agita?

Getting really tired of this.

I will never use a page that moves around as I try to read it.

I don't care what facebook does, because facebook doesn't matter, but news matters.

What really irritates me (and I know this may be a minor thing) is that our internet connection goes through our corporate office hundreds of miles away so the 'local' news and weather are for that area. Even more infuriating is that I've spent an hour trying to figure out how to get rid of it or at least change it to an area more 'local'. It doesn't appear to let you unless you login. I don't have a Google account and I don't want one. Why do I have to look at news and weather from a city hundreds of miles away? Why can't I get rid of it? Can't I just look at the normal stuff?

I also don't have a Facebook or MySpace account or Twitter or any other type of social networking. I don't care for them, I hate the format, and I hate the idea that I'm basically putting myself out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see. That's basically what I see happening with Google's new news site. Yes, previously my web surfing can be traced back to me with IP addresses and information from our corporate IT, but it's unlikely anyone would go that far to find out what news stories I read. 'Signing in' is somehow very offensive to me. Can't I just look?

I also agree that the format makes it much harder to skim through. Again, can't I just look?

There is definitely a misconception in the redesign of the site. They're assuming (since social networking is so popular) that we all want a Twitter or blog like format. How can I get back to the old format? How can I make the new format work for me by deleting or removing things like the 'local' news and weather? If there are people that actually like the new format, that's great for them, but how can the rest of us customize it back to what we want? If customization and personalization is the impetus for this, it has backfired. My opinion (and apparently that of many others) is that if you want to give more personal customization, giving them the choice to leave it like was is a personal customization.

Hows the traffic spike on Gnews Canada?

How come the rest of the world gets the original layout?

With the continued firestorm of criticism against the format change I can't understand the unwillingness on Google News to at least offer the the old format as an option.

Amber Case suggests that "users will get used to the new layout" well when something gets dumped on you and they ignore all user input to change, a good percentage of readers are not going to have the time or energy to go elsewhere that doesn't make it better.

My only hope would be that their news page hit count goes down and stays down, that is our only option as the consumers, I will be checking in occasionally to see if it has gone back to the old format but I will also make it a point that when I exit the Google news page it will be to go to News.Ask.com

From my standpoint I could probably be persuaded back if I could at least have back the 2 column layout that fit my wide screen monitor. Although it would be nice if at the same time they got rid of that right side list of old news.

I didn't know the terminology but I guess I'm just an "old dog" that hates to have new tricks shoved down his throat.

"Dashboards over streams for me"

Harry A.

Companies like Google live and die by seemingly tiny human interface differences. Google's redesign is a Google killer.

My biggest complaint is that the old Goolge News homepage had a nice section just for local news from my city. Now it is just a small little section that I had a hard time finding.

What prompted this ? Was there a groundswell of requests to google that I missed asking to change their news portal to this ball of confusion ?

I hate it. Please bring back the old design or at least give us the option to do so individually.

Thank you.

Would Google do this? Of course! As it is, they read your email (allegedly only by a computer, but by their admission to provide a more targeted set of ads in your mail).

The google news page is very nice! What an amazing service to have available, and for free! Now, I know that it is somewhat unseemly to complain about a free service, but I much preferred the format you provided last month. Would it trouble you too much to provide a link to a site that served up the old format? Thank you in advance.

Very truly yours,

Joe GXC

Google gave the car keys to some geek engineer who ran amuck with every HTML toy in the arsenal - and lost.

They totally failed to consider the millions of us who made Google News part of our morning coffee ritual - and brought a slide-rule to the world's breakfast table.

And when we complained - they stuck the damn thing in our eye and said "what's your problem"?

Google is completely tone deaf to the millions of ADULTS who want a no nonsense morning news experience - and gave total reign to a geek with an attitude.

When God wanted to curse the wicked in the Bible He said "I will appoint children as your masters - the sights you see will drive you mad".

Rob

I liked being able to move to the top the news I was more interested in - World News, US News, Health, Sci/Tech and move other things below the "fold". I cannot do that any more.

I don't buy or read newspapers and relied on what Google could provide in the way of snips and links. I could then investigate in more detail.

Google News is no longer going to be my home page.

Also, this new feature in the redesign that will "personalize" or "tailor" news articles on my page to “my interests” is ridiculous. I don't want that at all. The reason I liked Google News in the first place, was because it offered a wide range of topics from various news outlets. It exposed me to thoughts, opinions and issues I never would have gone looking for on my own. The "personalized" feature takes all that away. How can I be exposed to new ideas and issues when my news page is set to only display my supposed “interests”?

It’s just too much. I’m going elsewhere.

Personally I expect the outcries over the redesign will cool off shortly. The new interface does give less of an overview, but it provides for a more focused reading than the previous (portal) layout. As mentioned in the post, the reactions on the FB NewsFeed were definitely less than all positive, but i think it's safe to say that we would now never want to go back.

The question, perhaps, is how much we are willing/able to filter in our own minds while scanning a page, and how much we'd expect the news aggregator to do for us. How smart can the algorithms be, and how efficient the end-user setup.

Layout is an annoyance; at least one user has fixed that with a CSS tweak in his browser.

But no longer having the ability to control special sections is a deal-breaker.

I can get news alerts elsewhere - and now will.