Google News - a case of bad usability
There are several things in any Google service I use that I don't like. This turn I'm going to write about Google News.
Signed on or signed off, each time I go to news.google.com via my laptop's Iceape or my desktop's Seamonkey I see what I expect: Google News. When I go to news.google.com, signed off, via my cellphone's Opera Mini I'm redirected to news.google.pt without being questioned about it. They assume, by some unknown to me reason, that since I'm Portuguese I probably want to read the Portuguese news, which I don't. That wouldn't be bad if I had an easy way to change to the International Google News... But I don't. As a matter of fact I'm fed up with this problem for a long time now and I still can't find a way to, in news.google.pt, to go to news.google.com. What really pisses me off here, tho, is that at the end of the "Google News Portugal" page I have the sentence "Versões internacionais do Google Notícias disponíveis em:" (meaning "International versions of Google News available in:" with a list of countries. The problem is that clicking in one country there does not redirect me to the countries' Google News, but instead it redirects me to what I suppose should be a translation of the actual Google News Portugal into another language. What happens in reality is that if I click in "United States" I go to a Spanish Google News!
WTF? This kind of usability problems just make Google News completely unusable to me if I'm using my second most used device to get news. Way to go.
Signed on or signed off, each time I go to news.google.com via my laptop's Iceape or my desktop's Seamonkey I see what I expect: Google News. When I go to news.google.com, signed off, via my cellphone's Opera Mini I'm redirected to news.google.pt without being questioned about it. They assume, by some unknown to me reason, that since I'm Portuguese I probably want to read the Portuguese news, which I don't. That wouldn't be bad if I had an easy way to change to the International Google News... But I don't. As a matter of fact I'm fed up with this problem for a long time now and I still can't find a way to, in news.google.pt, to go to news.google.com. What really pisses me off here, tho, is that at the end of the "Google News Portugal" page I have the sentence "Versões internacionais do Google Notícias disponíveis em:" (meaning "International versions of Google News available in:" with a list of countries. The problem is that clicking in one country there does not redirect me to the countries' Google News, but instead it redirects me to what I suppose should be a translation of the actual Google News Portugal into another language. What happens in reality is that if I click in "United States" I go to a Spanish Google News!
WTF? This kind of usability problems just make Google News completely unusable to me if I'm using my second most used device to get news. Way to go.
I can go to any Google News site, with no problem. (In fact, the Portuguese one is not my default site.) Can it be that you have a cookie problem?
ReplyDeleteSomething worst happens to me with google. I work in a international company whos servers are stabilish in german.
ReplyDeleteWhen I use google news or blogger, I get news for germany and the german blogger page.
I can customize it, but every week server and IPs are refreshed and... german again!
MJ: I think that having a cookie is what's making me read the international Google News site in both my computers, and not having a cookie sends me to the Portuguese version. Anyway, how do you manage to jump from news.google.pt to news.google.com?
ReplyDeletens: Yes, that's the kind of critic I wanted to do, in general, with this post.
You have 2 choises in the country list:
ReplyDeleteEstados Unidos (Spanish Version)
http://news.google.com/news?ned=es_us
and
U.S. (English version)
http://news.google.com/news?ned=us
If you want to have U.S. google news english version by default, you need to put the language "English United States" at the top of the list in Firefox.
Artur:
ReplyDelete* Yes, those links exist, but I shouldn't have to guess them;
* I don't use Firefox nor I'm able to change those settings on Opera Mini (the browser I was using). I shouldn't have to tweak anything to fix their mess.
Well to begin with, I am not so sure if Google News is the best source of news. I dont particularly like the way they aggregate news and ignore or avoid certain sources. its based on google's ads. like if a news site has google ads, they get priority. BBC news never gets featured in google news. isnt that ridiculous? i was surprised to see a different gamut of sources and better news aggregation at this apparently new startup www.faceoftruth.com
ReplyDelete"BBC news never gets featured in google news" <- I'm sorry but this ain't true...
ReplyDeletefaceoftruth has bare minimum functionality. looks like a pretty crappy amateurish attempt at faking google.
ReplyDelete