Google News is reportedly getting a major revamp, borrowing features from Google's Play Newsstand and YouTube and gaining faster loading times and more video.
The update will likely make its debut at Google's annual I/O developer conference, which takes place next week. The revamp should not only make the app look better, with a more modern design, but it should also make it significantly faster.
Google News Update
According to sources who spoke to AdAge, Google has been talking to publishers lately about the upcoming changes, which will unify a number of features into a single product: Google News.
"There are a lot of Google services where you find news, and what they're trying to do is bring it all under one brand," said a publishing executive, as cited by AdAge.
To offer more features under one umbrella, Google News will reportedly incorporate Google's Newsstand digital magazine app, as well as YouTube's news portion. Google News will get a new app while Newsstand will shut down.
AMP For Google News
As for the faster loading perk, Google will reportedly use its accelerated mobile pages platform, or AMP for short, to boost the loading time for Google News articles.
With AMP technology and various Google news services consolidated into a more solid and comprehensive option, Google News should become significantly more useful and with better features.
This, in turn, should notably boost adoption, prompting more users worldwide to rely on the service to get the information they're interested in. Google News offers various sections of interest, including Technology, Science, Health, Entertainment, and more, in addition to local news, world news, or top stories.
Google News Getting Better
As Google is focusing more on news, it's ramping up its efforts to deliver quality services that would encourage customers not only to try them out but also to keep using them.
Users can already subscribe to various online publications using their Google account credentials, and Google News will show content from those subscriptions more prominently in search results.
At the same time, Google is also making heftier investments and efforts toward countering fake news, implementing a number of extra security measures to ensure it only delivers quality content. For instance, if publishers choose to mask their home country, Google will refuse to feature them in search results.
Google News will reportedly include more videos as well, and it will be interesting to see how the said revamp will look and feel overall. With Google's I/O 2018 just days away, real scoop straight from the source will soon become available.
