Google News is the company's latest offering in the publication space. Not only does this service come with a plethora of new features - which we'll get to in a moment - in an inspired moment, Google has also scrapped its existing News & Weather and Play Newsstand services.
Google News will now use AI and machine learning to organize your articles from multiple publications, putting curated articles, podcasts and soundbites it gathers front-and-center in the "For You" section, based on your interest. It also brings together hyper-local stories, based on your location.
Unlike other services, however, if you have your doubts regarding the nature of a certain article, you'll be able to peruse of a feature called "Full Coverage", which shows you the same story but from multiple other sources, meaning that you'll see exactly what everyone else will see pertinent to the story if they too make use of this button.
The app will also come with a feature called "Newscasts", which are short, Snapchat-esque bits of information on a certain subject from multiple sources for quick consumption.
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Google has relegated all of Play Newsstand's functions into a separate tab called "Newsstand", where you can subscribe to publications of your choice. The company has collaborated with 60 outlets here, allowing you to directly pay for their subscriptions from your Google account through the company's "Subscribe With Google" platform, without having to go through a separate process on their own app or website.
"Subscribe With Google" is part of the Google News Initiative, the company's collection of efforts to improve the state of digital news.
Like before, the Newsstand continues to allow you access to over 1,000 magazine subscriptions, so that aspect of the app remains unchanged.
Google News will rollout on iOS, Android and the Web starting today, and should reach all 127 of its target countries by next week.
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