Google News Alternatives

Google launched a new design for the company's Google News service recently which Google stated was a long overdue modernization of it.

As is the case with most fundamental changes to a service, Google has not received only love for the change but also criticism.

While mobile users seem to be fine with Google News for the most part, at least some desktop users are not. They state that there is too much widespace, and that the layout is not optimized for going through news quickly anymore as less news articles are displayed on the visible part of a page.

The option to vote with your pageviews exists, and it is probably one of the most useful ones in an Internet user's arsenal.

Google News Alternatives

The alternatives are listed in two groups below: first a group of news sites that is reviewed individually, and then a second group with alternatives that are mentioned only briefly.

Bing News

Bing News is a mainstream news aggregator that is available in multiple localized editions. It highlights top stories on its front page, and pulls news from newspapers, and online publications.

The homepage features trending topics as well from all areas of interest. You may filter news by type, for instance World or US news, and access news on important events directly there as well.

Newsmap

Newsmap is quite the interesting service, and not only because it uses a non-traditional design for displaying news on its site.

Newsmap color codes news and displays news headlines in different sizes on the page. All colors are displayed at the bottom of the interface for easy reference, and an option to hide certain types of news.

If you are not interested in health for instance, you can toggle the news topic off there to remove health related articles from the display. Another option that is displayed there is to change the time period that news articles have to be published in for them to be listed by Newsmap.

It is furthermore possible to change the language of news from English to a dozen other languages or regions including Germany, France, or Spain.

Some entries may be barely readable, but you can hover the mouse over any to display the title, first paragraph and other information such as the publication it was published in.

The service pulls data from Google News.

Wikipedia: Current Events

This is not your typical all-news covering news portal, but a selection of major events from around the world.

You may switch between worldwide current events and sports events on the site, and get a selection of news topics and topics by date on the page.

Note that you may select one of the languages displayed on the left to list language specific news. These may differ highly, and some appear to be updated less frequently than others.

The right sidebar lists ongoing events, sport events, elections and referendums, or deaths for easy access.

Or, Legiblenews.

Other Google News Alternatives

• Left Right Center is focused on news from the US. It lists sources that are left or right leaning to provide readers with all points of views on topics.
• Memeorandum is for politics what Techmeme is for technology. The site covers only political news, and pulls data from a variety of online publications.
• New York Times Morning Briefing, a once a day summary (but not on weekends).
• Reddit/r/news is the news hub of Reddit. Users post and vote on news on the site, and since it is one of the largest sites out there on today's Internet, it never takes long for important stories to be linked and discussed on the site.
• The States Report covers national and world news (and others), and lists news in an easy to access way on its site.
• Techmeme covers only technology news and pulls news from all major tech publications on the Internet. What I like about it is that it often lists multiple sources for news articles.
• Virwire pulls news from around the world and displays them in a simple layout that is optimized for mobile but accessible on desktop systems as well.
• Yahoo News is another mainstream news source. It is very similar to Bing News in scope. One major difference is that the first click on news links opens part or even all of the story on Yahoo News.

Now You: Have another alternative for Google News that works well on the desktop? Feel free to share it below in the comment section.