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.