Google experiments by adding news and weather to its homepage

[mongeese]

Editor's take: Google.com feels like one of the friendliest pages on the internet. It stood out in the days of Yahoo as being one of the simplest search engines, and it stands out now as one of the few sites that don’t clamor for your attention with news and messages. But wait.

Soon Google.com could change. According to 9to5Google, the company has been testing adding a row of cards to the bottom of the page. The screenshot above shows six cards. Staples like the weather and the news are on the sides, and in the middle are stock prices, links to shows and movies, and recommended websites. It’s a similar catalog to what you’d find in the Google Discover app.

Even though it looks like a feed, it isn’t. There’s no way to scroll and access more cards and if you shrink the browser window, some of the cards disappear. Mousing over them (see below) makes them pop up and reveal more information.

Is this a genuine recommendation, or a paid advertisement for Robinhood?

Under the cards, on the left, is a little disclaimer: "Based on your past activity." On the right is a toggle to hide or reveal the cards.

Reports indicate that only a small percentage of users can see the cards, so as usual it sounds like Google is doing A/B experimentation and rolling out the feature to a small number of random users for now.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/93473-google-experiments-adding-news-weather-homepage.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Local Weather and Local news are nothing more than excuses to activate location based services - ie: tell your GPS position at all times.

 

[Underdog]

My first and only reason for using Google is because of the clear uncluttered opening page. Yahoo, for instance is my worst nightmare. I notice in the article it says you can switch off the new page junk but for those of us who have things set up to delete cookies, etc. when closing a browser it will all come back again to pee us off next time. Let's hope the idea gets binned.

 

[RudyBob]

Snot my homepage

 

[kiwigraeme]

Local Weather and Local news are nothing more than excuses to activate location based services - ie: tell your GPS position at all times.

Unless you are trying really hard - I'm sure google knows exactly where your home is .
I don't use a VPN - my ISP took my static address away - but the dynamic ones I get point to my city . I kind of like it my Chrome stores no cookies beyond current session - so easy to click ok to cookies to read something - but a pain as Steam etc think I'm logging on from a new device every time ( How many devices do I own ? - should learn to whitelist certain cookies ).

You can turn off location on your phone - use some other mapping app - for nearest Chinese restaurant . But unless you have a custom OS or Apple with google removed - Google will still know where you are from phone towers or what not .
For me Utility vs Paranoia - easy win for Utility.
The google chrome sync feature and Apple similar feature - must be a godsend for C Drive crash for some people

 

[OortCloud]

The only thing you can be sure of with Google is that it won't have been added for our benefit and will involve scraping lots of info about you without asking.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Just another thing to adblock.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

People still use Google?

 

[Nobina]

People still use Google?

Are you from the future where they don't?

 

[OortCloud]

Are you from the future where they don't?

That's a future I'd love to be a part of. No Facebook, Instagram or Google and Elon and Jeff have both buggered off to Throngor-13B in there ****-rockets and left us in peace.