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.