Tracking election coverage

Posted by David Garnick, News Engineering Team

I'm a bit of a junkie for political news, and of course I follow elections. The U.S. section of Google News covers a broad range of topics that are of interest to a national audience; thus, typically, few stories pertain to elections. There is no simple query that I can use in the News search box that will give me a broad and current selection of stories related to the elections. To provide direct access to extensive coverage of the candidates, the campaigns, and the issues, Google News has launched a new Elections section on our front page. This brings you the top stories on national, state, and local elections throughout the United States.

The Elections section appears on the front page along with all of the previously supported sections. If you've personalized your front page, you can add this new section with a single click of the button following the announcement at the top of the front page. If you navigate to the full Elections section, there is a gadget you can use to "Follow the Candidates." The candidates tab allows you to select the candidates you wish to track. The video, news, and blogs tabs allow you to find content specific to those candidates. The maps tab allows you to follow those candidates on the campaign trail. You can use the button below the gadget to add the gadget to your iGoogle page.

Now I can easily satisfy my appetite for election news, and as a big election season gets underway, I'm excited and proud to be working on the Google News Team to help keep others informed too.

Cricket Scores in Google News

Posted by Sadeesh Duraisamy & Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers

We're excited to share a new feature for Google News India: you can now get the latest cricket scores right on the front page! If there's a cricket match going on somewhere in the world (and there always is) you will have the latest information available. And if you want all the cricket news in addition to the latest scores while you're on the Google News front page, you can personalize Google News by creating a custom section. In fact, even if you don't read Google News India, but still want to get the latest cricket scores, simply add a custom section from the India edition to your edition, and you'll be able to see the latest cricket scores on your Google News front page wherever you live. Be sure to check out our Hindi News edition as well.

We hope this gives you your fill of cricket scores and more, so let us know what you think.

New Advanced News search

Posted by Sheng Yu and Sean Wan, Software Engineers

Want to find articles from a specific news source? You may not know of some tricks to make Google News do the work for you. Try using our site operator along with a keyword, like this: [site:iht.com Paris]. Or you can also use our advanced news search page. Just type the source name into the news source box and click the search button, and you'll get stories from the source you want.

And if you've ever forgotten some or all of the name of a news source, in the past, you'd have to rack your brain to figure out the complete name first. We kept this in mind when we improved our advanced search. You don't need to spend time trying to remember the complete name of a news source any more. Just tell us the words you know: [source:"new york"]. Then we will return articles from those sources whose name contains these specific words.



You can also use the new, smarter advanced news search page. When you are typing the source name into the source box, suggestions will be shown in a drop-down list. If you select one of the suggested sources, your search results will include only articles from the source. If you just type in some keywords, articles from those sources containing the specific words will be returned.

One more thing: you can also do operator searches and use the advanced search page in all editions now. We hope you enjoy these new features, and we'd love to hear your feedback.

Quantity and quality

Posted by Sharad Jain, Software Engineer

The goal of Google News has always been to offer as many perspectives on a story as possible to help you better understand current events. That's why we crawl thousands of sources from around the world. We try to help you find stories in every language, in every country, from every newspaper and for every story. But Google News isn't just about including every story; it's about helping you find the stories that matter most to you. The way we do this is with our news ranking algorithms, which are designed to enable you to make sense of all this information by showing you the most relevant news first.

We are constantly improving our algorithms to bring you a better organized, more relevant selection of the day's news. This is an ongoing process, but in the past few months we have been working on a number of improvements that we hope bring us closer to this goal. While many of these aren't new features that you might notice right away, we hope they'll provide a better experience.

One example we recently released is a new algorithm to help determine the most recent update to a story. In other words, it lets us find something new that's been added to a breaking story. So instead of just seeing the most recent publishing activity for a breaking story, we highlight the sources which brought you the information in the first place. Once there's new information from another source, we update our results so you get any new developments to the story.

Another signal we've added helps us recognize the importance of local context in a story. In order to provide a local angle to global events, we have started actively promoting high quality local reporting in addition to coverage from foreign sources. This means we try to find sources at the scene of a story who are doing original reporting. It may be a national or international story with many sources from around the world reporting on it, but often times one of the best sources of information on a story are those closest to it.

There are quite a few other exciting quality initiatives we are working on, but we don't want to take away all the suspense! So keep reading Google News and sending us your ever-helpful feedback on these changes. Namaste!

Easier-to-use news sitemaps

Posted by Andy Golding, News Engineering Team

Hey news publishers, have you checked out Google's Webmaster Tools lately? Did you know that you can submit a sitemap listing specific articles you would like us to include in Google News? Recently, we announced that this capability is available to all publishers in all Google News editions.

Today, we're excited to tell you about a change that makes it easier for publishers to create sitemaps: you can now include articles from multiple hosts in the same sitemap. For example, if you own world.mynews.com, business.mynews.com, and sports.mynews.com, you can submit a single sitemap containing articles from all three hosts; it is no longer necessary to maintain a separate sitemap for each. The sitemap itself can reside on any of the hosts. The only requirement is that all articles in the sitemap be for the same news publication. This was announced on the Webmaster Central blog last month, and we're excited to make it possible for news publishers. This should simplify the process of sitemap submission for many of you.

Going forward, stay tuned for innovations both small and large to help make it easier for you to include your content in Google News. If you have feedback or suggestions for us, please visit our News Help group.

Now in the Czech Republic

Posted by Marián Dvorský, Software Engineer

The Czech edition of News was my first 20% project here at Google. Therefore I'm very excited to see it now live at news.google.cz.

Zprávy Google (as Google News is called in Czech) aggregates stories from hundreds of news sources in the Czech language. Stories are presented in sections similar to those in other editions. We have modified the Health section that is common to other editions to include travel and lifestyle articles as well.

I hope our Czech users will find the edition useful. For me it is now time to move on to an another exciting 20% project.

To sign in, or not to sign in: that is the question

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

If you rely on getting your daily dose of news from your personalized Google News homepage, here are a couple of things you can do to access it from anywhere in the world. In case you're not familiar, personalizing your Google News homepage allows you to create custom sections that contain stories on a specific topic. You can also add standard sections (such as Business or World) from other regional and language editions. It's a great way to get all of the news you want in one place!

The easiest way to manage your personalized News page is by signing in to your Google Account. This will allow you to access your news page from any computer in the same way you would log in to your Gmail account. Signing in also lets you switch across to our other services quickly and easily. For instance, if you’ve just finished checking your messages on Gmail and want to switch to reading the latest news, all you need to do is click on the News tab that is displayed at the top of the page and you’ll be redirected to your personalized Google News page.

The neat thing about Google News is that it lets you personalize your News page even if you decide not to sign in to your Google Account. However, keep in mind that by choosing this option, you’ll only be able to save and view your personalized News page only from the computer you’re using. Therefore, if you’ve personalized your News page on your work computer, you won’t be able to view it using your home computer.

Another limitation of not signing in to your Google Account is that you’ll lose all the settings and changes made to your news page any time you clear your cookies. To prevent this from happening, after you’re done customizing your news page, you can click on the link at the bottom of the homepage that says "Share your personalized News with a friend" and send it to yourself. By saving the URL of this version of Google News in your Inbox, you can access your personalized Google News page from other computers by simply retrieving the email that was sent to you. Just remember to resend this link to yourself anytime you make changes to your news page so that you’ll always have the most up-to-date URL of your personalized Google News homepage.

If you feel this is too much of a hassle, then I recommend you sign in to your Google Account to create your personalized News page. It’s easier, faster and only one click away from Gmail and all other Google products.

Add Google News to Your Site

Posted by Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer

If you are a web site owner, a blogger, or a professional site designer, take a look at the latest creation from the AJAX Search API team. With just a few clicks, anyone can configure and add a sleek looking Google NewsBar to their site.



The NewsBar is designed with your needs in mind. It can be configured in a horizontal mode where it delivers a continuous stream of news headlines to your site. The vertical mode delivers both news headlines and snippets. The NewsBar is perfect for your topical sites or blogs. For instance, if you are following the Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton race, try this NewsBar.

If you are a professional developer and want to use some of the more advanced features of the NewsBar, there is a complete developer guide that will walk you through all of the options. If you run a blog on Blogger, the NewsBar is already built in. To add it to your blog, just edit your blog's layout, and add the "Newsreel" page element.

A few controls that might complement your use of the NewsBar are, The YouTube VideoBar, The LocalSearch Control for Google Maps, the Slideshow Control, and the Dynamic Feed Control.

Get your news fix on your iGoogle page

Posted by Kevin Liu, Jin-Ho Kim, Jaeho Kang, Software Engineers

Lots of people love small, portable, sexy gadgets, and that's exactly what we've just created. We're not talking hardware, of course -- what we're introducing is the iGoogle News gadget.

The iGoogle News gadget shows your favorite Google News in a small-screen format, complete with news headlines, snippets, and thumbnails, grouped by news clusters. If you're really into a particular story, there are links to see the full text and related news in a cluster, or more stories in the same category.

It's easy to add the gadget to iGoogle so you can read daily news alongside your mail and other favorite feeds. It can also be displayed on partner sites, or even added on your own web pages using iGoogle syndication technology.

The iGoogle News gadget uses tabs to display different news sections separately in its own tabs, and you can customize the news sections you want to see. You can also create custom sections by entering query terms in the "edit settings tab" (the "+" tab). The gadget allows you to reorder tabs by dragging and dropping, just as you can do with gadgets on your iGoogle page.



You can also select the news editions you want to see and easily add multiple news gadgets to your iGoogle page. Customize each of them, and enjoy reading Google News from multiple countries at a glance. The new News gadget has been localized to 19 languages and supports 38 News editions (more coming). We've also added it to iGoogle as a default gadget on several domains. Add it to your existing iGoogle page.We hope you enjoy this gadget, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

Google News goes social

Posted by Tina Huang and Dan Meredith, News Team Engineers

Whether it is from our homepage, one of our RSS feeds, or on a mobile device, Google News seeks to connect people with the news that matters to them -- wherever they may be. As part of that goal we are pleased to announce the Google News Application for Facebook. This experimental application enables users to create custom sections or select from a set of pre-defined topics, then browse and share stories with their friends on Facebook. We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience. Enjoy!

Catching the news as it breaks

Posted by Abraham Epton, News Support Team

I recently moved about two thousand miles across the country, and aside from the lack of good pizza, one of the most disorienting things about having moved is not knowing what's going on back home. That's why I'd like to tell you about one of my favorite Google tools, Google Alerts, which makes staying current as simple as checking your email every morning.

I use Alerts to keep track of news about Chicago politics, but the beauty of Alerts is that you can use it to look for anything that appears in a news story, blog post, Google Groups thread or anywhere else on the Internet. Just go to google.com/alerts and enter the term or terms you're interested in, along with the sources you'd like to see results from, how often you want to receive the alerts and your email address. You can create up to 1,000 alerts per email address, and you can update your preferences at any time by following the links at the bottom of any Alerts email you receive.

However, you can use Alerts for much more than checking up on shenanigans in the 1st Ward. If you're in a media-sensitive environment, such as a political or public relations campaign, you can create alerts that let you know whenever you or your client appear in the headlines - as soon as the story breaks. You can be the first to know when something happens to your favorite baseball player, when a review appears for a new movie you'd like to see, or when a new lolcats site goes live.

But Alerts are also very useful for news publishers and webmasters who want to track the inclusion of their content in Google News. Using our search operators -- like the site: operator, which returns search results from a specific domain (i.e. searching for "site:nytimes.com" will return all articles from the New York Times) -- a news publisher can get a daily email listing a selection of articles from their site that made it into Google News. And of course, anyone can use Alerts to notify them when a new post goes live on their favorite news site, or when something happens involving one of their competitors.

With millions of pages being updated every day on the still-nascent Web, it can be difficult for mere mortals to stay up-to-date. Thankfully, with Alerts, you can rely on the world's largest search engine to help you out.

News sitemaps for publishers around the world

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, News Support Team

If you're a news publisher and want greater control over how your articles get included in Google News, we've got a great opportunity for you: Today we made Google News sitemaps available globally. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now directly submit your most recent articles via News sitemaps in all the languages we support. You can also specify keywords for each article to tell us more about them so we can better place them in the appropriate news section. You'll get error reports specific to Google News explaining any problems we experienced crawling or extracting articles from your site. And you'll receive additional information on the types of queries that lead Google News users to your site.

Why should I use News sitemaps? So that you can tell us which articles you'd like us to crawl.

When should I submit my articles? As early as possible. You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner we can crawl and extract them. The result is that you'll boost your publishing power, and we'll process your most recent articles more quickly, since we recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.

How do I submit a News sitemap? Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn't included in Google News, you can request inclusion.

Sounds good. How do I check the status of my submitted News sitemap? Once we've verified site ownership through your Webmaster Tools Account, you can view details about your site, including error reports, from the Dashboard by clicking on your site link in the Site column and then clicking the Sitemaps tab.

What if I don't use News Sitemaps? We don't favor sites that use a News sitemap over those that don't. We still crawl all news sites quickly. However, a News sitemap is a great tool to give you greater control over how your content appears in Google News and to alert you to any errors we might encounter when we try to crawl your site.

What if I have more questions about News sitemaps? Take advantage of all these benefits by submitting your articles today by visiting our Help Center for Publishers.

In case you can't tell, we're pretty excited about this new feature. We think News sitemaps can be a real help to publishers and we're glad we can make them available to more publishers. Let us know what you think -- we'd love to hear from you.

First click free

Posted by Christina Cacioppo, News Support Team intern

As a college student, I use Google every day – email, news, documents and spreadsheets – you name the product, and I probably use it. This has made my summer internship with the Google News Support team even more illuminating. Though I thought I knew the ins and outs of many Google products (and there are lots of them), I'm actually only a beginner.

The News Support team interacts with users on a daily basis; we’re the go-to people for help and troubleshooting for our readers and publishers. We work hard to provide a comprehensive experience for Google News readers - from occasional surfers to news junkies. Whether we’re adding new sources or supporting new features (like video!), users are one of our primary concerns. Does a certain source have original articles that you will be interested in? Will you be able to access these articles?

One feature I’ve become more aware of is First click free. If you aren’t familiar, First click free is a way for publishers to share their subscription-only content with Google News readers. All articles that are accessed from Google News are allowed to skip over the subscription page.

In practice, this means that when you click on a link from Google News, you'll be able to see the article without receiving a prompt to login. If you would like to read more from the same source and choose to click on another story, you'll be taken to a registration prompt. We like to think of First click free as a simple system that allows you to test drive a news source before signing up on their site.

Finally, if publishers of subscription-based sites aren’t a part of our First click free program, we’re still happy to include their content – we’ll just tag the source as “(subscription)” to let you know that when you click on that article, you'll be directed to a subscription page.

If you love the current features of Google News like First click free (or if you don’t) you can share your thoughts with us on the Google News group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Getting even more news via feeds

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

A few weeks ago we blogged about how Google News personalization works. Now let's take a look at getting the most out of Google News feeds.

For one thing, you can get articles from your favorite news source directly on your iGoogle page. Here’s what you need to do: perform a Google News search using our site: operator. In the results page click on the link "RSS" or "Atom" located on the lefthand side of your screen. You’ll be taken to a new page that lets you choose where to receive this feed. You can add this feed to your iGoogle page, your favorite newsreader or another application you like.

Remember that you can subscribe to feeds for any sections of your personalized Google News homepage, or for any of the queries you perform in Google News. Another very nifty use of feeds: you can also subscribe to the content of almost all of our 41 editions. So if you speak another language, or just get a kick out of reading news headlines in different languages, you can set up as many feeds as you like for as many topics as you like. For instance, let’s say that you only care about articles on “Google” coming from the Italian edition, but don’t want to create a dedicated section on your Google News homepage for this topic. Here’s what you can do:

- go to the Italian edition of Google News using the link available at the bottom of our homepage
- perform a search for “Google"
- click on the RSS or Atom feed links in the results page (placed in the same location for all our editions)
- subscribe to the feed.

Don’t forget to check out our Terms of Use and feel free to post on our Help Group to share ideas and tips from other news fans.

Original stories, from the source

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

Today we’re launching a new feature on Google News that will help you quickly and easily find original stories from news publishers -- including stories from some of the top news agencies in the world, such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press -- and go directly to the original source to read more.

Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News. However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. Enter “duplicate detection.” Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of 20 “different” articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away.

By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content. Previously, some of this content could be harder to find on Google News, and as a result of this change, you'll have easier access to more of this content, and publishers will likely receive more traffic to their original content.

Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press don't have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. As a result, we’re hosting it on Google News.

Duplicate detection isn't just for our news agency partners -- it also enables you to find the original copy of articles from publishers and news agencies that have their own destination site. For these publishers, we’ll continue to show just a snippet of the story and a link, so you can read the full story on their site.

We hope you agree this will improve your Google News experience. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Would you like video with that?

Posted by Lucy Zhang, News Engineering Team

One of our goals at Google News is to offer as many different perspectives on the news as possible. That means bringing content from multiple sources together in a way we hope you find to be organized and relevant. Now we're adding video to the mix: we're showing related news videos along with our news articles to give you a broader spectrum of info available. You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there.




Today, viewing news videos or other content types on the web can be a frustrating experience. You often get videos that don't play, sites that require different video player downloads, or have misleading descriptions of the content. That's why we're working with YouTube so you can easily view online videos without any downloads required and regardless of what browser you're using.

For our initial launch, we have included several top news sources such as CBS, Reuters, and a number of local Hearst TV stations. Over the next few months, we'll continue to add new sources as fast as we can. Right now we're just offering this addition in the U.S., the UK, and Ireland; we hope to make it available in other languages and editions soon.

We're excited to add this to your Google News experience, so give it a try and let us know what you think.

What's on your personalized News page?

Posted by Gina Bonzani, News Support Team

I "grew up" in Google supporting News and communicating directly with publishers and readers. One thought I’ve seen over and over is that people want to be able to see the news that interests them the most. And a great way to do that is to personalize your Google News homepage.

One of the easiest ways to personalize the News homepage is to move the sections that you most like to read to the top of your page and remove the sections you don’t. For me, that means no Sports section. Or, if you’re interested in a particular topic, you can use personalized News to create a custom section using a keyword. Many Google News readers use this feature to track their favorite sport or team. Others use custom sections to track politics, specific politicians or their own hot button issues. You can even get custom sections with articles from certain publishers (check out the search for site:nola.com), or articles written by sources from a certain state or country (like location:CA, for California). News publishers can even use custom sections to track which articles we’re crawling from their site.

I myself will be using a custom section to help me plan for my Jamaican vacation later this summer. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a wild season for hurricanes, so I’ve set up a custom section using the keywords [atlantic hurricane]. This section will help me stay up to date to see whether the season turns out as badly as predicted. (Even if I have to brave gale-force winds and rain for a couple of days, I’ll still have fun!)

Finally, if you use a feed reader (such as Google Reader) to read your news, you can get an RSS or Atom feed from your custom News section. Just click into your custom section and click on either the RSS or Atom link on the lefthand side of the page. For more info about feeds, check out our online help content.

We’d like to hear about how you're using personalized News to get the news that interests you. Visit the Google News group to tell everyone about your most creative or interesting personalized News section.

Perspectives about the news from people in the news

Posted by Dan Meredith and Andy Golding, Software Engineers, News Team

We wanted to give you a heads-up on a new, experimental feature we'll be trying out on the Google News home page. Starting this week, we'll be displaying reader comments on stories in Google News, but with a bit of a twist...

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

As always, Google News will direct readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic. From bloggers to mainstream journalists, the journalists who help create the news we read every day occupy a critical place in the information age. But we're hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that -- whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates-- a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.

We're beginning this only in the US and then, based on how things go, we'll work to expand it to other languages and editions. We're excited about the possibilities of this new feature and we hope you are too, so if you've been covered in a news article please send us your comments and we'll work with you to post it on Google News.

Google News for mobile

Posted by Asif Zahir, Product Team

We launched Google News for mobile devices last year to bring you access to the news you want, whenever you want. You can search for and browse through your favorite news headlines, all optimized for viewing on a mobile phone. You can even customize the homepage to add news sections that you care about.

What I like to keep in mind, though, is not just how convenient Google News for mobile can be, but how essential. One of our engineers was recently traveling through Africa when he ran into a loyal Google News user. When the Googler asked the local if he knew that Google News was available on mobile, the local guy replied with a puzzled look: "Of course -- how else would you get to it?" Well put, since nearly 9% of the world accesses the Internet via a mobile device.

Since then, we've launched Google News for mobile in 20 countries and are working to make it available in many more - so stay tuned if your country isn't yet covered. If you're living in Brazil, Sweden and Norway, I hope you're enjoying any of these three most recently launched versions! And if you happen to be reading this and you're a publisher of mobile news content we haven't yet discovered, we'd love to hear from you.

The News Discussion Help Group

Posted by Frances Lewis, News Support Team

Got a question about Google News, or are you curious about how to start personalizing your News page to get the stories you care most about? It doesn’t matter if you’re an avid user or a life-long publisher - we have the place for you. The Google News Discussion Group takes questions of all shapes and sizes. With so many readers out there, it only makes sense to have a home for helping one another use Google News better.

The Group is also a way for us to step in and help you when others can’t, as well as a great way for us to hear about the new features you all are asking for. Don’t understand a new feature? Want to ask for a different one? The Group is the place to do it.

Some of you may have already recognized me as the Google News Guide in the group. Though I’ll be heading off to law school soon, I want to introduce the new guide in town: Let's make Marcela feel welcome. And if you haven’t already joined, what are you doing right now?

In short, whether you want to know why Hindi appears to be spelled incorrectly on the homepage, or how to use our first-click free option as a publisher, do come visit.

Empowering publishers with a new Help Center

Posted by Tanya Keen, News Support Team

How do you keep thousands of Google News publishers informed about getting their content included in Google News? In September 2006 we launched our first version of a Help Center for Publishers. Since then, Google webmaster tools expanded their offerings to enable news publishers who are already included in Google News to submit a News Sitemap. Not only does this allow publishers to control which articles go to Google News; it also allows them to get unique error reports detailing which articles were successfully crawled, and if they weren't included, why not.

So we've streamlined the way news publishers can make sure their content gets picked up by our crawlers.

Now we've adapted our Help Center for publishers to get better educated about Google webmaster tools. Publishers can now more easily let us know about changes they make to their site, including name, location or domain updates. We've also clarified how publishers go about removing an article or image from Google News, like in those cases when something has been published by mistake and the article has since been recanted. And if you were confused by our old contact forms (so what *do* I put in the state/province field of the "Send us your news site" form?), we think you'll like the ease-of-use of our new contact forms.

If you love our new Help Center, or if you don't, you can share your thoughts with us on each and every Help page you see. Just look for the "Was this helpful?" text at the bottom of the Help article to share your opinions with us. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

News is forever global

Posted by Jaya Jha, Associate Product Manager

I was pretty excited when I found out that one of my first projects here was going to be to launch Google News in Hindi. Over 300 languages are spoken in India, and the chance to build a local product that people I knew would find useful was a pretty thrilling challenge. That one launch taught me a lot of things about how issues and challenges vary according to region, users and languages. It made it clear that users want news in their language, presented in a way that they appreciate the best, highlighting content that is most relevant to them. We also want Google News to give you the ability to find out what's happening locally in any part of the world, and give you the means to see a wide variety of global viewpoints on local news.

When and where to create a new edition of Google News is a complex process. We start by looking at a number of different factors in deciding where to launch next, but in the end, the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once we've decided on our next edition, we start adding sources to our news crawl. We try to identify as many news sites as possible prior to launch, and then add to those as publishers and users suggest other news sites to us once we're live. While the news sites in a given country are in the native language, we still need to translate all the other pages that make Google News possible, from navigation to help pages, into the new language. After that we do plenty of testing, and post-launch we work to improve each site with more sources and better results.

So far our news internationalization team has built Google News for 18 languages, 41 editions. Most recently, we've added a Greek version of News to our list of international editions. Of course, there are always more languages to offer, more countries to reach, more features to be built for each edition, and more content to be organized and made accessible. We look forward to bringing you many more changes and improvements in the coming months.

Viewing the world through images

Posted by Lieping Tang, Software Engineer, Google News

One of the goals of Google News is to enable readers to read the news in the way that works best for them. In looking at how people use Google News and based on feedback we've received, we've found that many people prefer to read the news in a more visual way. As a result, over the last few months we have been working on Google News Image Version

The Image Version of News lets you view and explore the top headlines of the day through photos instead of just text.


When you roll over an image on the left, it exposes the full snippet and link to the related article on the right side of the page. Clicking on an image will take users directly to the article the image came from. In addition, users can search for image search results. For example, searching for Iraq in Image View would give the following results.

Even if you prefer a standard headlines page, viewing News through Images can be very useful. One classic example is sports. If you want to see the latest action, Image version lets you view the photos for a given team or for a specific game.

We're pretty excited to add this to the Google News experience, so give it a try and let us know what you think!

All the news that fits

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

Welcome to our first post on this new Google News Blog! You may be asking why there's another Google blog - and why the focus on Google News? Believe it or not, the answer is not just because we've got a free account from Blogger. Let me explain.

There are a lot of blogs by teams here that try to shed as much light as possible on updates and the thinking behind our services. And as a company, we spend a large amount of time working with news publishers, but mainly from the advertising side of things. But on the Google News team, our focus is on the news and people who read it. In fact, we think there are two kinds of people interested in Google News: those newshounds who use it to gather and read the news -- and news publishers. We hope publishers will learn a bit more about what Google News readers like and expect, and readers will learn a bit more about all the great content publishers churn out every day.

So why a blog? As a company, we don't issue many press releases, and we're not keen to send tons of email to thousands of in-boxes. A blog lets us reach you quickly and directly, and be a bit more informal. We hope it generates cross-links and new ideas. If you want to engage in discussion, visit our Google News U2U group.

We'll be posting about new features, giving you tips for getting the most out of Google News, and responding to questions. We'll also tackle the issues regarding how Google News works, why we do things the way we do and, of course, what we can do better. Just about every member of the Google News team will be posting, so when you read about a new feature, you'll be getting it from the person who built it.

At the end of the day, we hope we can demystify Google News a bit and give you as much insight as possible into how it works. But we're also counting on you to help let us know how we can improve it going forward.