Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:00 PM
Posted by Lucian Cionca, Software EngineerLast summer we redesigned Google News with new personalization features that let you tell us which subjects and sources you’d like to see more or less often. Starting today -- if you’re logged in -- you may also find stories based on articles you’ve clicked on before.
For signed-in users in the Personalized U.S. Edition, “News for You” will now include stories based on your news-related web history. For example, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we'll make sure that you get a chance to see breaking baseball stories. We found in testing that more users clicked on more stories when we added this automatic personalization, sending more traffic to publishers.
Also for signed-in users, we’ve introduced “Recommended Sections” in the side column that suggests topics you can add to your news page as custom sections, based on stories you’ve clicked on before.
If you don’t want to see personalized news based on your Web History, you have a few options:
- Click on the “Standard U.S. Edition” link at the bottom of Google News. This will not delete any of your News settings or Web History. It will switch you to an unpersonalized version of Google News for the duration of your current session. (To switch back, click on “Personalized U.S. Edition”.)
- Delete your web history. (Google News may take some time to update.)
- Log out of your Google Account.
Update 6/6/2011:
We've extended the scope of automatic personalization to include Google News's "Local" and "Spotlight" sections. Since Spotlight has always been about serendipity, we are personalizing it with a light touch. As ever, if you'd prefer to see an unpersonalized edition, you can still switch to "Standard U.S. Edition," log out, or remove your web history.
