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.