Google has been
experimenting with personalizing Google News, and MediaPost got a look at the proposed layout Friday. The Mountain View, Calif. search engine has been running tests on the design of Google News for
the past several months.
The new design places trending topics down the left rail with top stories, several in each category, in the middle column and local news on the right. Trending
topics, which Twitter began using from the start, allow people to see the top searches at a glance.
Click on a trending topic and the link takes you to a personalized page filled with news on
the left and still images and/or videos on the right.
About halfway down the home page, Google asks those signed in to choose their interests. Telling Google how often you like to read news from
each section in the list -- from World to U.S. to Business to Social Networks -- will determine how the search engine will personalize the page.
"At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our Web sites all over the world," says a Google spokesperson.
"Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News home page design."
Personalization has been a major push for Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. It helps advertisers better
target ads, from paid search to display.