Google News Alternatives
Google launched a new design for the company's Google News service recently which Google stated was a long overdue modernization of it.
As is the case with most fundamental changes to a service, Google has not received only love for the change but also criticism.
While mobile users seem to be fine with Google News for the most part, at least some desktop users are not. They state that there is too much widespace, and that the layout is not optimized for going through news quickly anymore as less news articles are displayed on the visible part of a page.
The option to vote with your pageviews exists, and it is probably one of the most useful ones in an Internet user's arsenal.
Google News Alternatives
The alternatives are listed in two groups below: first a group of news sites that is reviewed individually, and then a second group with alternatives that are mentioned only briefly.
Bing News
Bing News is a mainstream news aggregator that is available in multiple localized editions. It highlights top stories on its front page, and pulls news from newspapers, and online publications.
The homepage features trending topics as well from all areas of interest. You may filter news by type, for instance World or US news, and access news on important events directly there as well.
Newsmap
Newsmap is quite the interesting service, and not only because it uses a non-traditional design for displaying news on its site.
Newsmap color codes news and displays news headlines in different sizes on the page. All colors are displayed at the bottom of the interface for easy reference, and an option to hide certain types of news.
If you are not interested in health for instance, you can toggle the news topic off there to remove health related articles from the display. Another option that is displayed there is to change the time period that news articles have to be published in for them to be listed by Newsmap.
It is furthermore possible to change the language of news from English to a dozen other languages or regions including Germany, France, or Spain.
Some entries may be barely readable, but you can hover the mouse over any to display the title, first paragraph and other information such as the publication it was published in.
The service pulls data from Google News.
Wikipedia: Current Events
This is not your typical all-news covering news portal, but a selection of major events from around the world.
You may switch between worldwide current events and sports events on the site, and get a selection of news topics and topics by date on the page.
Note that you may select one of the languages displayed on the left to list language specific news. These may differ highly, and some appear to be updated less frequently than others.
The right sidebar lists ongoing events, sport events, elections and referendums, or deaths for easy access.
Or, Legiblenews.
Other Google News Alternatives
- Left Right Center is focused on news from the US. It lists sources that are left or right leaning to provide readers with all points of views on topics.
- Memeorandum is for politics what Techmeme is for technology. The site covers only political news, and pulls data from a variety of online publications.
- New York Times Morning Briefing, a once a day summary (but not on weekends).
- Reddit/r/news is the news hub of Reddit. Users post and vote on news on the site, and since it is one of the largest sites out there on today's Internet, it never takes long for important stories to be linked and discussed on the site.
- The States Report covers national and world news (and others), and lists news in an easy to access way on its site.
- Techmeme covers only technology news and pulls news from all major tech publications on the Internet. What I like about it is that it often lists multiple sources for news articles.
- Virwire pulls news from around the world and displays them in a simple layout that is optimized for mobile but accessible on desktop systems as well.
- Yahoo News is another mainstream news source. It is very similar to Bing News in scope. One major difference is that the first click on news links opens part or even all of the story on Yahoo News.
Now You: Have another alternative for Google News that works well on the desktop? Feel free to share it below in the comment section.
Bingnews was the best alternative now they suck. They took out searching for news by date today.
For French Google News, 7 alternatives !
-> https://www.dsfc.net/internet/veille/alternatives-google-news/
I dropped Google News when they implemented their major revamp quite a while ago, but I returned to it a few months ago and found it supports my interests (prejudices :-) ) usefully again for US viewers. It is one of many sources I use to keep some sense of what is going on in my small view of the world.
You have forgotten Yahoo! News et MSN.
-> https://www.dsfc.net/internet/veille/alternatives-google-news/
progress for progress sake.
As was posted, this is the best option. I still miss the old-old version of this with multi-column views, but this is at least as acceptable. no more stupid politifact and snopes. thx.
https://news.google.com/news/feeds?output=rss&q=%ned
What I am looking for is something like the old old google news where I can minimize topics I’m not interested in and add (and rearrange) offbeat topics I need for work. In Google News I normally keep 6 extra topics and scan the news several times a day.
I also hate having to keep a different window open for a search engine. The old old Google News had a general web search built in.
Why do people change things that work really well?
After all the work I did to get rid of Google News “Fact Check” which featured “Gossip Cop” and the Kardashians crap, sports, etc, Google just updated their news feed again and it’s all back and this time you can’t get rid of it. I’ve finally reached the point – so after much investigation, I *finally* found what I’ve been looking for! Check out https://flipboard.com !
As Anonymous said in a previous comment, theoldgnews.com is great (works as a http proxy for Google News).
Unfortunately at this time there is no way to choose the country/language. But it’s planned. I think the developer needs support. He’s doing an awesome work on this.
https://twitter.com/theoldgnews
And for the old layout, I just found this and it is working at this time:
https://news.google.com/news/feeds?output=rss&q=%ned
Fingers crossed…
Thanks! Amazing. My sections are there too. Like coming home. Big thanks.
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you!!!!
Your https://news.google.com/news/feeds?output=rss&q=%ned suggestion sucks. You can’t even change the edition to whatever country you want. As an american vacationing in another country, I want news about mine and the uk. Thanks but that was just a waste of a few seconds. At least oldgnews kinda works.
My suggestion does not suck, sir. It’s not convenient to you, but it’s very useful to me and I know it is and will be to other people, and it’s not my fault if some functions do not work. But thank you anyway for mentioning this issue.
And I’m so sorry that because of me, you wasted a few seconds of your so precious vacation time.
The closest I have found that has a similar look and feed to the old Google News layout is https://www.pressgrade.com
I still use Google News on my laptop which has a nice layout for my 1920×1080 screen in conjunction with the Chrome Change Colors extension (which also works well for ghacks). But Pressgrade seems promising even though it will not work well with Change Colors, and does not have an Alert function.
solved http://theoldgnews.com
And after trying all these, I found that the best no-nonsense site is Associated Press
https://apnews.com/
Today I was glad to be able to come back here to look up some links that I had found useful in this article. Somehow I lost all the bookmarks in one of my browsers.
As a “Thank-you note” I wish to add two links that I find useful and that have not been mentioned here, yet:
– https://www.newslookup.com
– https://www.allsides.com
Thanks for this information. I am one of those who got annoyed by the new google news layout. It just doesn’t work on my laptop computer. Some alternatives I found are:
– http://www.newsnow.co.uk is pretty good, though a bit oriented towards the UK. They do cover world news, though.
– http://www.kranten.com for Dutch readers
I use wn.com now. Much better and more sources.
Lately I’ve been enjoying the simple text-only https://cor.ax
I personally love statesreport.com. Fast, easy to read, with a variety of sources.
ah, today this blog is a breath of fresh air. i want to thank martin for bringing up the subject and several others for their suggestions. the new google just makes google done for me. the re-do was just the straw…. anything google i do i now do in a completely separate browser…all by its lonesome. track that suckers.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/ is quote good as well with lots of sections and its updated every few minutes.
ahmed some of us are not american worshippers. Instead we are of planet earth
Incidentally, I’m Canadian. US politics and economics have a greater impact on Canada then events in Europe, for example.
My links get you to the Newsola website. It has options to choose other countries.
I have switched to using Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/).
This may not be the solution for everyone, particularly because you need to run it under web server software like Apache, but it is fantastic for me. It uses Google News as the news source by default, but you can change that as much or as little as you like. It can gather the news nonstop, and if you are game for running a server that is accessible from the internet, you can check in with it from anywhere.
In a sense, I have to thank Google — the redesign made their site unusable to me, so it spurred me to find an alternative. And I’m happier with this alternative than I ever was with Google News.
http://180report.com/ lets you flip a switch for a left/right perspective. It’s updated thrice daily.
One of my favorite sites lists the 20 most viewed articles on the New York Times. If something is important, it will be found here.
http://www.nytimes.com/most-popular-viewed%3Ftype%3D1
Thank you.
For those of you who want Newsmap without flash, there is Newsola which works on html5.
http://www.newsola.com/#/us/
You can configure the address as such: I don’t like sports so I link like this:
http://www.newsola.com/#/us/w,n,b,t,e
Also, if you place your mouse over a section and scroll, it will expand that section. Scroll in reverse to go back out.
Perhaps Martin could write an article on Newsola.
I like news aggregator Newstral:
https://newstral.com/de
https://newstral.com/en
Yes. As so often seems to be the case and despite my reservations about Google tracking the truth is that Googles applications including seem to be he best.
In the same time, you can still use the classic Google search engine with the ‘tbm=nws’ parameter.
Efficient. No wasted space. You can even make it more compat with a bit of CSS, like so :
https://imgur.com/VugHuHj
Care to post the CSS you used for the ultra dense layout? Also, I’m assuming you are using search terms, yes? I wonder if Google News can be hacked to display the same information as Google News, but modify the layout with CSS.. hmm..
How did you do that? Thanks Terrine. https://newstral.com/en looks interesting.
Newsmap: Oh no! Seems like you do not have the Flash 9 player plugin installed.
ORLY?! Flash 9 did you say? Goodbye, Newsmap, you’re stuck in a time machine. And Flash is gone. 😂
As bad as the new Google News is none of the others are any better. I love the personalization of displayed items.
Well, with the latest so-called “update” to Google new personalization is now buried so deeply as to make it almost useless.
Buried — or eliminated?? Feels like the latter to me. The news sections are now forced on you with no ability to eliminate them (I don’t care about Entertainment for example). And worse yet, sub-categories within any major section cannot be configured.
Example: Do you like Motorsports and Football but don’t care about any other sport? Tough. Now Google throws all sports at you. You’ll spend a lifetime picking “Less articles like this” but good luck eliminating all sports except the 2 you care about. And perhaps within Motorsports, you care about Formula 1 racing and certain car manufacturers (let’s say, Lotus) but don’t want to hear about anything else? No way to add a keyword (“Lotus”, “Formula 1”, etc) like you used to. Again, you just have to deal with whatever news it throws at you and spend time each day with “more like this” and “less like this” without ever getting what you were after.
The big issue with all this is that no one is asking for a new feature. Google News supported enough customizations such that people could configure their news exactly how they wanted it. But the updates from last year plus this recent one have now wiped all that out.
Really makes me want to start a configurable news aggregator site… Why doesn’t a good one exist?!
Memorandum is a fantastic site for both political content and ability to customize preferences in a useful way, e.g. font size. Its multiple references for a given article are very useful. I wish I had known of the site before now.
Newsmap requires Flash. I’m not willing to run Flash anymore, too risky. They should have used HTML5.
I use http://www.freshnews.org/ and https://wn.com/ instead of google news . I have a wide monitor and both use most of the screen width.
@Eric
Try Newsola. See my comment below.
Try these sites as well:
http://metro.co.uk/ news
news, sport, world
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news
news, sport, world, political, business
Both sites are in english.
Those are news sources, not news aggregators like Google News and the ones listed here.
FYI http://newsmap.jp uses Google News as the backend.
No only there is no middle ground with the website space which the articles are taken from the whole page. But also and even more important there all shock jocks nowadays. Sensation and more sensation that is the name of the game.
The quality of subject and deep research there all a thing of the (even ferry far away) past.
Its all about the ratings so if it’s entertainment that he vieuwer wants entertainment they will get!
NO middle ground these days. Win 10 and most websites place tiny text in the center of huge white space, forcing me to wear out my fingers scrolling. On the other end of the spectrum there is now Google’s Newsmap page which gives me a headache just looking at it. It reminds me of the nightmare I just woke up from, an attack of hard-edged clashing colors from which there is no escape.