Google News facelift focuses on showing you the facts

Google News got a redesign this week that's more about facts than fonts.

As with any redesign, the aim is to present a cleaner, uncluttered page that makes content easier to find and digest. The desktop News page has adopted a card format intended to help you browse for stories, which will generally be labeled with publisher names and tags such as Local Source, Most Referenced or Opinion to provide more context about the issues represented.

One of those labels is Fact Check, which Google has been using for some time in search results. The label gets attached to stories from a credible fact-checking source like PolitiFact or Snopes when they pop up in searches. It's now being extended to Google News' Headlines section, showing a dedicated block of the most fact-checked stories recently published.

"Facts are at the heart of a story's credibility," Google said Wednesday in an introduction to the redesign.

The spread of misinformation has been a high-profile problem for the world's biggest tech companies. After Donald Trump was elected president in November, some of his detractors argued that misinformation on Facebook helped him win. Facebook has since tried to curb fake news by adding fact check labels of its own. Both Facebook and Google also amended their advertising policies to try to ensure fake news stories don't make money.

Google's news page also includes a column on the left side that you can customize with topics of particular interest to you.

The changes are expected to roll out globally in the next couple of days.

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