Google quietly rebrands ‘The Keyword’ to the new, generic ‘News from Google’

If you visit blog.google today, you might notice that something feels a bit different. Google has rolled out a subtle redesign to its flagship publication, but the most striking change isn’t the visual layout of the homepage; it’s the name sitting at the top left corner of the page.

Google has officially dropped The Keyword brand name, replacing it with the way-less-cool and far more utilitarian “News from Google.”

A loss of personality for Google’s main mouthpiece

For nearly a decade, The Keyword served as Google’s primary corporate blog. Launched back in 2016 as a unified destination to replace dozens of scattered product-specific blogs, the name was a clever nod to Google’s search DNA. It had a distinct personality and gave Google’s official announcements, deep dives, and product reveals a simple home.

Moving to “News from Google” certainly removes any ambiguity about what the site contains, but it feels like a real step backward in terms of branding. It trades what I felt was a super-clever, memorable brand for something that feels like a generic press release site. While the domain remains blog.google, the name change really strips away a bit of the fun and character the site still has.

The new layout isn’t my favorite, either

Alongside the name change, Google tweaked the front-page layout, and it’s great looking, but a bit less consumable. The new design leans heavily into large, image-forward feature cards and horizontal carousels at the top of the page.

While those massive visual hero banners look clean at first glance, they make scanning for actual news much less efficient. Instead of letting you quickly scroll through a dense, scannable timeline of recent headlines and timestamps about halfway down the page, the new layout forces you to do a lot more scrolling and navigating through category blocks to see what actually launched today.

Overall, the redesign feels like they’ve prioritized flashy visuals (that do look good) over actual density. For a site now called “News from Google”, I would’ve expected a move in the other direction, honestly. Either way, I’ll likely still refer to it as The Keyword for a while. A decade’s worth of habits is hard to break.