Building news experiences
Listening to feedback
In a rapidly-changing news landscape, it’s critical that we understand people’s news-related preferences and needs so that we can build and maintain useful experiences. Before designing a new product or making changes to an existing one, we conduct testing, which can take many forms, including interviews, observations, and surveys.
In addition to testing, we also accept feedback on our product experiences. This feedback might take the form of new feature requests or letting us know when something isn’t working quite right. We compile and review all of this feedback and use it to help guide what changes we make to our products.
Evaluations, experiments, and expert reviews
To help ensure all new features meet our goals to provide high quality and relevant information, we have a rigorous process that involves both live tests and thousands of trained external Search quality raters around the world. Our raters follow strict guidelines that define our goals for Search and are publicly available for anyone to see.
Data from these evaluations and experiments go through a thorough review by experienced engineers and data scientists who assess whether the changes deliver the desired benefit to the people who use our products. Features are also reviewed to ensure that they adhere to our policies, including making sure that we are respecting the privacy of our users.
Creating topical experiences
The content you see in our news products is selected and ranked by algorithms. There are infrequent exceptions, which we communicate to users, when we create designated topical experiences. For instance, members of the Google News team may create experiences for temporary topics or major events such as an awards show, a major sports event like the World Cup or an election. The team may determine the structure within the topics and, in specific cases like the Oscars, highlight specific content, such as multimedia, to enhance the experience. The news results you see within these experiences are selected and ranked by algorithms.
Other designated experiences include the Newsstand tab in the Google News app, which highlights an array of news sources and topics selected by Google News staff in efforts to help users discover news sources they might be interested in. In Discover, we may also showcase stories that are experimenting with new visual formats.
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