Cool Tool for News Use

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Our friends at the Toolbar team recently launched Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer out of beta in 40 languages. To celebrate this occasion and Toolbar's upcoming eighth birthday, we upgraded our Google News Toolbar gadget: You'll now find tabs with different Google News sections embedded directly into the toolbar, so you can read the news as soon as it breaks, browse top news headlines and images, all without having to leave the site you're on:

You can click through the different categories to see the top stories in the U.S., World, Entertainment, and Sci-Tech domains. When you find something you want to read, you can click on an article to open it in a new tab, or click "all news articles" to open the Google News page containing all related items on that particular topic.

To learn more about the different features on this new release of toolbar, visit toolbar.google.com/features.

Election results in real-time

Posted by Robert Leland, Software Engineer

Today, Americans all across the country are voting, and the results will soon be tallied. We'll make sure you can stay abreast of the election returns on the same Google News pages that already bring you current election news. We'll be providing results from the presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial races as they are reported by the Associated Press.

On the front page of Google News, you'll find a Google Map gadget showing real-time popular and electoral vote counts. On the Elections section page, you can see more detailed results. At the top of the right column we have summaries of the presidential race, and the races for majority control in the Senate and House. Beneath the summaries you can select a state in the pull-down menu. For each state we display the breakdown in votes for the presidency, governor (where there is a race), and for each Senate and House seat that's being contested. You can also follow the presidential election, and see a summary of the popular and electoral votes by visiting news.google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered mobile phone.

For more Google election tools, be sure to check out our 2008 Elections page. It features some useful Google Maps, including one which can give you the location of your polling place. So keep up with the results as they're reported, from wherever you are -- and be sure to add your vote to the tally!

Looking back in time for context

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

News coverage usually focuses on the most recent events, and when we first launched quotes, we did the same. However, past events frequently provide context that helps us better understand the present. With this in mind, we recently extended our quotes coverage back to 2003. Hopefully this new data (our quotes index grew 15x in size!) will help shed light on what people have thought and said over time, and how their views have changed.

As always, to find a person's quotes you can search for their name on Google News, and if we have any quotes from that person, they'll appear in a onebox at the top of the page. Click on the 'more by' link and from there you can simply browse through all our quotes from that person, or filter them to a specific year using the links on the left. Try comparing Alan Greenspan's quotes on the economy from 2004 to those from 2008:


People running for office are some of the most prolific speakers, especially on economic matters. In Quotes makes it easy to compare what McCain and Obama have said about the economy (or, try comparing Palin and Biden.)

Of course, quotes are not restricted to politics--there are also many from sports figures. See what Michael Phelps said about the 2004 and 2008 Olympic games, or what Roger Federer has been saying about Wimbledon.

Straight from the horse's mouth

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager

With Google News, you can read what candidates are saying about a given topic. You can even compare what two of them are saying about the same topic. But it's also important to hear candidates deliver their own message themselves, in their own voice.

Today, we're adding another tool to the Google News suite to enable you to find and access political messages straight from the horse's mouth. Using the Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) technology already available on Labs, you can now search for and watch political videos right from the Google News election page.

Starting today, after reading an article about a topic that matters to you, you can quickly find out what the candidates have to say about it and hear them say it. Just enter the topic you're interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we'll search candidates' YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (all candidates, McCain's campaign, Obama's campaign or the presidential debates). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you're looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video. You can also share a given video with your friends (just click on ), in case they don't want to take your word for it. Keep in mind that speech-to-text technology is not perfect yet, and some transcriptions might contain some errors. But we think this tool will serve as a valuable resource as we count down to Election 2008.

Checking for political consistency (or inconsistency) has never been so simple. And as election day nears, keep checking our election-related projects.

Google News in Telugu

Posted by Kiran Gunda, Software Engineer

During this festive season we are excited to welcome the newest member of the Google News family - Google News in Telugu. Like all Google News editions, the Telugu edition gathers news from several Telugu sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections.

We know that the 75 million strong Telugu speaking population wants to stay on top of current affairs and we hope this new edition makes it easier for them do so. The Telugu edition is our fifth Indian edition of Google News; we already have editions in English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.

As we've blogged about in our previous Indian language edition launches, one of the biggest challenges we faced was making sense of the many non-standard font-encodings used by various publications. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of the text because they are not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well established standard for exchange of text today, we strongly encourage news websites to adopt the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard.

If you are a Telugu news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can contact us to request inclusion. In some cases, we were not able to include news sites because of technical reasons having to do with the structure of the URL or proprietary encodings. You can learn much more about making sure your content is surfaced correctly by reading our documentation on Help for Publishers.

And then Google News came to Poland

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist, News Online Team

We're thrilled to announce that we've launched Google News in yet another language: Polish! With this launch, Google News is now available in 23 languages and 48 country editions.

In addition to searching and browsing more than 300 news sources from their desktop, 40 million Polish speakers from Poland and around the world will also be able to find News results through an iPhone. These news results will also be blended into standard Google search results. So to quickly get an overview of what's happening in Poland right now, go to http://news.google.pl/

If you're a Polish speaker, you can check out what Przemysław Budkowski wrote about this launch on the Google Poland blog:

http://googlepolska.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-news-w-polsce.html

To all our Polish friends, welcome aboard!

Say what?

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

While political consistency (or inconsistency) can be funny, as John Stewart pointed out in a recent episode of the Daily Show, it can also be a serious political matter.

With upcoming elections in the United States and Canada, we've built a tool that you can use to compare what candidates and other political figures are saying about different issues: we call it "In Quotes." As you might know, Google News already extracts quotes from news articles. Even so, it was a pretty tedious process to compare what two people were saying about a particular topic.

As you might have guessed, In Quotes allows you to do just that. You can easily read what, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama have already said about the economy, education or energy (that's just the e's!). There are more people to select from beyond the US presidential candidates, though, and we also have customized lists of people and topics for Canada, the United Kingdom and India. You can scroll through quotes for each topic, or click the "spin" button to see a random quote for the issue. As with our existing quotes feature, the quotes are automatically selected from Google News articles. It's also worth pointing out that we've launched this feature in Google Labs, which means that it's an experimental feature for the moment.

If you dig on political gadgetry (like I do) you should check out Google's other election-related projects, or another cool take on quotations in the news. Happy spinning!

Google News for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan

Posted by Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineer

Over the last few weeks we've presented a number of new language launches for Google News: 9 new editions in Africa, a Turkish edition and a Malayalam language edition in India.

We're proud to present the three newest members of the Google News family: editions for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan. These are all English language editions.

So, what does it mean to launch a new edition of Google News in a country? With these editions, we hope that readers in these countries can now reach the best news destinations on the internet even faster, and help news publishers better connect to news readers. If you are an English language news publisher in Malaysia, Philippines or Pakistan and don't see your site on our editions, please don't hesitate to contact us to request inclusion.

Google News in മലയാളം (Malayalam)

Posted by Cibu Johny and Deepak Raghuwanshi, Software Engineers

എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും ഓണാശംസകള്‍!

To all our Malayalam-speaking readers, we want to wish you Onashamsakal. We are very happy to mark this festive season with the launch of Google News in Malayalam. Like all Google news editions, the Malayalam edition gathers news from several Malayalam sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google news sections, we have a separate section for the Gulf Region, which has a large Malayalam-speaking population.

We know that the 35 million Malayalam speakers around the world want to stay on top of the current affairs. So this is our fourth Indian edition for Google News; we already have editions in English, Hindi and Tamil.

Some of the interesting challenges we faced while building this edition were making sense of the myriad font-encodings that exist in Malayalam, as in other Indian languages. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of text because it's not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well-established standard for exchange of text today, we make a plea to readers to contact the news site owners to change their site to use Unicode. The other interesting challenge was faced in preserving the Malayalam chillu characters. You can verify the configuration to view Malayalam in Unicode as described in this documentation.

If you are a Malayalam news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can contact us to request inclusion. We hope this edition will help Malayalam speakers the world over to find the best news in their language and find their news faster.

Update on United Airlines story

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

Aggregators like Google News were today the subject of news – this time pertaining to a 2002 story regarding United Airlines. For those of you who are interested in the nuts and bolts of why this was indexed by Google News, here are the details:

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36PM Pacific, the Google crawler discovered a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link appeared in that section sometime after Googlebot's last crawl at 10:17PM; because the crawler saw this new link appear, it followed it to an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."


The only date found in the context of the article indicated that the article was from September 7, 2008.


The article was indexed and then available through Google News search, but was not shown on our headlines pages.

We removed this story from the Google News index as soon as we were notified that it had been linked to in error.

It has been widely reported that many readers were unable to determine the original date of publication of this article, and our crawling was similarly unable to recognize that the article was old.

UPDATE 9/10/08

Since our last post, some have asked why Google News didn't recognize that an old story relating to United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy was outdated. We thought that a brief chronology would be helpful.

On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time (or Sunday, September 7th at 1:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time), the Google crawler detected a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel's website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link had newly appeared in that section since the last time Google News' Googlebot webcrawler had visited the page (nineteen minutes earlier), so the crawler followed the link and found an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." The article failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline, but the Sun-Sentinel page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern).

Because the Sun-Sentinel included a link to the story in its "Popular Stories" section, and provided a date on the article page of September 7, 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story. We removed this story as soon as we were notified that it was posted in error.

While we don't know why the Sun-Sentinel's website included the link in its "Popular Stories" section, our timestamps show that Google News first crawled the UAL story after following the link from the Sun-Sentinel's "Popular Stories" box:

• At 10:17:35 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved a copy of the Sun-Sentinel business section page.
  
  
  As you can see, no UAL story appears at this time.


• At 10:36:38 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved an updated copy of the same section. This updated version included a new link in the "Popular Stories: Business" section to a story titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."
  
  
  


• At 10:36:57 PM/PDT, our crawler followed the new link and fetched this copy of the UAL story.
  
  
  
  At that point, our index was updated to include the article with the date that the story was crawled, and the story became searchable on Google News.


• At 10:39:57 PM/PDT, the Sun-Sentinel received its first referral to the UAL story from Google News, with a user clicking on a Google News link to the Sun-Sentinel's UAL story.

The Tribune Co. (owner of the Sun-Sentinel) has confirmed in its September 9, 2008 press release that the first referral from Google News to the article came after the UAL story appeared in the "Popular Stories" section.

We hope that this sheds some light on the situation from our perspective.

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time

Posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager

Today, we announced that we're launching an effort to give Internet users everywhere more tools to discover, explore, and celebrate much more of our journalistic heritage by digitizing archival newspapers and making them available online in partnership with newspaper publishers across the world. Head on over to the Official Google Blog to read more about this new initiative.

Live coverage of the GOP Convention on Google News

Posted by David Garnick, Product Manager

The Republican National Convention is underway in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Google News is taking you there. Well, maybe not literally there, but as close as we can get you! For the duration of the convention, you can watch live streaming of the activities on a player located on the special Elections section of Google News. (It's also embedded just below this sentence.)

Live Streaming by Ustream

We're working with Ustream.tv to stream the coverage live at the following times:

Tuesday, September 2: 6:20 - 10:05 p.m. CDT
Wednesday, September 3: 6:20 - 11:20 p.m. CDT
Thursday, September 4: 6:20 - 10:15 p.m. CDT

If you miss some of the speeches, highlights from the convention will be broadcast at other times all week long.

I'm excited that I can watch the convention, alongside ongoing news coverage, from the first balloon to the last confetti.

News without borders: search results across languages

Posted by Mahesh KM, Software Engineer

One of our most important goals for Google News is to expose readers to a diverse range of journalistic viewpoints. This is why we think it's important to have hundreds, if not thousands of different sources for important stories. It's also why Google News is currently available in more than 20 languages.

We've recently released a feature which we call cross-language search, which will help you find even more perspectives when you search in Google News. Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.

You won't see results in different languages unless they're at least as good as those in your own language. This means it's more likely that you'll see results in other languages if you're using Google News in a country which doesn't have many online news sources. You'd also be more likely to see them if you're in a country in which more than one language is widely used, such as Canada or India. For a language which has lots of sources, like English, it's unlikely that you'll find a foreign-language result when you search normally on Google News -- especially if you're searching from within a monolingual country like the United States or the United Kingdom. However, if you were searching for a breaking story in another country, and sorting your results by date, you might see a foreign-language story from a local news source which has the latest coverage.

Similarly, if you type in a query in a foreign language, we'll know to display results from that language, no matter what version of Google News you're using. For example, if you use the Czech edition and want to see how the new Batman movie is being reviewed, we'll show you results from countries where it's already been released, in English and Czech. Or if you're reading the Spanish edition of Google News and want to learn more about the recent G8 summit, we'll show you results in English as well as Spanish, since 3 of the 8 countries in the G8 are Anglophone, and none are Spanish-speaking.

More African countries now have their own edition of Google News

Posted by Divon Lan, Product Manager

Google News is a truly international project, spanning dozens of countries and over 20 languages. But that still leaves plenty of countries without their own dedicated edition of Google News.

Today, we are delighted to announce that we've made great progress in our quest to give Google News an even more global reach, by adding 9 more countries to our repertoire. If you head down to the bottom of any Google News page, you'll see new English editions in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

With these 9 new editions, Google News now has a significant presence on every one of the world's inhabited continents: 5 editions in North America; 7 editions in South America and the Caribbean; 19 editions in Europe (including Turkey); 11 editions in Asia, the Middle East and Oceania; and now 10 editions in Africa.

Google brings News to its Turkish users

Posted by Mustafa Icil, Country Marketing Manager, Turkey

Today, we're delighted to announce the launch of Google News in Turkey. Now, Turkish-speaking users in Turkey and around the world are a click away from the latest news in their native language. The Google News Turkish edition crawls articles from more than 400 sources, so that news enthusiasts in Turkey can easily discover and read a wide variety of perspectives on important stories.

We think this is a significant step towards helping our Turkish users find even more content online. We're pleased to note that with this launch, we've made over 40 regional editions of Google News available in 22 different languages.

If you're interested, you can try out the Turkish edition at news.google.com.tr or haberler.google.com.tr.

Google News goes to the Summer Games

Posted by Lara Rennie, Software Engineer, Trondheim

We have software engineers from almost every country in the world, so we know as well as anyone how passionate folks can get about their hometown athletes. This year, the Google News team is doing our part by launching a Summer Games section in different news editions so that Games enthusiasts around the world can follow the progress of athletes from New Zealand to Norway, in whatever language they prefer to read their news.

Our Summer Games section highlights the action by bringing together the top articles about the Games. This automated section, currently available in our most popular languages, combs through all the news we can find to show you the most up-to-date headlines from the 2008 Games. The section also includes two gadgets along the right side of the page: one to help you keep tabs on upcoming events and one that displays the all-important medal count.

So on the News team, we're ready for a little friendly international competition. Will the U.S. retain its 2004 distinction as the winner of the most medals? Or will China, with its home advantage, oust the States from this coveted position? One thing we know for sure: our News engineers in Norway will be cheering for Norwegian supremacy no matter what.

Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)

Posted by Vinodh Kumar, Kiran Gunda and Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers

வணக்கம். தமிழில் செய்திகள்! (Greetings, News In Tamil!)

It's not every day that you get to launch a product in a more than 2,000-year-old language spoken by more than 70 million people. That's why we're excited to tell you that Google News is now available in Tamil. Tamil is one of the most widely-spoken languages in India, which is no mean feat considering that there are 22 official languages here.

The Google News Tamil edition indexes news from a large number of Tamil sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google News sections, we have seperate local sections for Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, regions that are home to millions of Tamilians. One issue we faced during the launch of the Tamil edition was incorporating news sites that do not use the Unicode based UTF-8 standard. We faced similar issues when we launched our Hindi edition last year. Since then, we are pleased to note that several Hindi news sites have shifted to the Unicode standard (and we encourage all publishers to do the same, so that more people can read your online publication.)

We hope this edition will help Tamil readers reach their online news destinations faster and help Tamil news publishers to connect more easily to their readers.

Testing... testing... is this on?

Posted by Frank Harris, Senior User Experience Designer

Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism. They'll only be visible to a small number of random Google News readers. (In case you're wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can't give you any advice for how to get in!)

It's pretty normal for us to run this kind of test, as we're always working to improve the experience of using Google News. In fact, experiments like these are a cornerstone of Google's development process - here's a post on the Official Google Blog explaining this practice for our search results.

Reflections on the Sichuan earthquake

Posted by Xin Li, Engineering Manager

The devastating earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province at 2:28 pm on May 12. I was so worried: there was no news about what had happened shortly after the earthquake, and even worse, I was unable to reach my parents in my home town there. It was not until 2 hours later that my call to my parents finally got through, to find that, luckily, they were all safe. Despite my own good fortune, I could not help crying even in public for all the friends in my home town, whether known or unknown. The catastrophic impact was far more than the media could describe.

When the earthquake happened, we, as humans, felt ourselves to be so weak and helpless. However, as the rescue and recovery plans started, people found there was so much they wanted to do. The government, rescuers from around the world and indeed the whole nation have joined together to recover from this unpredictable disaster. Many of my colleagues in Google China helped to start several initiatives in response. The reaction to this misfortune has been overwhelmingly loving and positive. So far, the value of aid donated nationally and internationally has exceeded more than 6 billion USD.

As we, the Google News team in Shanghai, witnessed events, we had a strong desire to help keep people informed with in-depth coverage of the unfolding crisis. So we created a special section in the China edition of Google News to cover the earthquake. The section also contains a link near the top of the page which directs readers to a Checkout Donations page where they can make donations to people in need.

News carries the message, passes on stories of adversity and hope, and relieves the hardship. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we think that by spreading news about this tragedy, we can help connect people who care about it.

An aftershock of 5.3 magnitude struck Sichuan today, June 5, 2008. As of today, the China earthquake death toll has risen to over 69,100.

Our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow Sichuanese.

News mapped out on Google Earth

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

It's part of the vision of Google News to crawl and index every word of every news story, around the world. It’s a lot of information, but we’re working on ways to make this index more specific. For example, our local news feature allows you to view news stories from a particular area. Now, we’re taking this concept and making it visual: the Google Earth and News teams are working together to provide you with a new way to explore current events, via a real-time News layer on Google Earth. When zoomed out, you'll see the top stories from around the globe, tagged on the globe via placemarks. If you're interested in the news about a region, just zoom in and you'll find news stories about that location. We hope this layer provides you with another way to explore and discover news, perhaps about places you didn't even know existed.



To activate the Google News layer, navigate to the "Layers" menu on the left-hand side of Google Earth. Expanding the "Gallery" node in the layers tree will expose the "Google News" layer. Check the box next to the Google News layer and start zooming into the places on the globe in which you're interested. Each story is represented by a Google News icon on the globe. Clicking on the news icon opens up the news story's snippet, along with links to learn more about the event.

Responding to the crisis in Myanmar (Burma)

Posted by David Garnick, Product Manager

The massively destructive cyclone that struck Myanmar (Burma) has caused an extensive loss of life. However, in the wake of the cyclone, there are new crises facing the population of the country. Getting aid to those in need, stemming the spread of disease, and guarding the safety of orphaned children are among the most urgent needs.

To keep the world informed about these stories as they develop, we've launched a special section, titled Myanmar (Burma). The section is available in the English language editions of Google News in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The lead stories appear on the front pages of these editions. Like other front page sections, you can find deeper coverage on the specific section page.

In addition to providing news coverage of the ongoing crisis, the special section contains a link near the top of the page that will direct you to a Checkout Donations page where you can make donations to UNICEF or Direct Relief International. Now you can help make a difference while you keep yourself informed.

Keeping good news stories together: just part of what it means to work on Google News

Posted by Lucian Cionca, Software Engineer

Have you noticed that when there are a bunch of articles about the same story, we’ll group them together? I think this is one of the key features of Google News. When you're browsing through Google News and you click on a link to see "all 257 articles" about a story, you can read perspectives from different news sources, or see how a story evolves over time.

We call these groupings of stories “clusters.” So far, we’ve only kept individual news stories together for three days, after which time they’re broken out and presented on their own.

Today, though, we’ve removed the three day limitation, meaning that stories will stay in clusters (and be easier to find) for as long as they're in our index. Since stories in Google News remain indexed for 30 days, you’ll find clusters for any news stories from the past month. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every article is going to appear in a cluster - just that clusters won’t be broken up anymore.

As an example, if you search for [dalai lama paris] in order to read about the decision of the city of Paris to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, you'll get a story for that event along with related events:


In addition to greater perspective on news stories, this feature will also help us display more diverse search results on the first page: less space will be taken up by individual, unclustered articles. I think this brings us a step closer to our goal of making news universally accessible from as many sources, perspectives and languages as the world can offer.

Related Searches in Google News

Posted by Nilesh Agrawal, Sharad Jain and Deepa Iyer, Software Engineers

We're excited to share with you a new feature of Google News: related searches. Now, when you do a search in Google News, we'll show a list of related searches at the bottom of the search results page. We think that this feature can be useful not just for adjusting and refining your search, but also as an interesting way to browse the news, perhaps finding connections between stories that you hadn't seen.

For example, searching for [zimbabwe] may suggest the following results:



In this case, you're seeing a quick snapshot of the main politicians and political parties related to the presidential elections in Zimbabwe. Click a suggested term to see Google News results for that word or phrase. At the moment, you can learn about what's happening in the upcoming United States presidential elections by looking at related searches for [mccain] or [super delegates], or about what's happening in Russia by looking at related searches for [putin].

As is normal for Google News, there are no human editors involved in selecting related searches; these suggestions are automatically generated based on an algorithm to determine terms related to your search.

Google News now available on your iPhone and iPod Touch

Posted by Håvard Kvålen, Robert Leland and Amund Tveit, Software Engineers

As we sat in our offices in Trondheim staring off at the fjord -- we're Norwegians, that's what we do -- a thought occurred to us: wouldn't it be nice to make Google News accessible to readers on their iPod Touch or iPhone? The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we're happy to announce that Google News is now available to iPhone and iPod Touch users in over 30 countries. This means that you'll see a full-fledged version of Google News on these devices, improved Google News results and, where available, relevant YouTube videos embedded with news stories.



There are a few ways to get to Google News using your iPhone or iPod Touch:

• Go to www.google.com, click on the "more" tab and follow the link to Google News
  
• Go to www.google.com and do a search, then click on the News link at the top of the screen
  
• Go directly to Google News at http://news.google.com in your browser
  

We hope you enjoy this new feature. We haven't been able to take our eyes off it yet, not even to look at the fjord!

Words matter

Posted by Jack Hebert, Akash Nanavati and Natasha Mohanty, Software Engineers

Be it poetry or public speech, words matter.

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.

To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results.



Clicking on the speaker's name will take you to a page with even more of their quotes. From there you can search within the quotes by entering a query on the left side of the page. For example, entering [iraq] in the search box will produce quotes from John McCain that mention Iraq.



For a different viewpoint, try Barack Obama's quotes on Iraq.


Visit our user to user forum to tell us about how you're using the quotes feature.

Need Help? Contact our Support Team!

Posted by Greta Ghizzo, News Support Team

Last week we launched a new form that will make it easier for users around the world to report an issue with Google News. With the Report an Issue page you’ll be able to send us a quick note to inform us about the problem you’re having with your edition of Google News.

Simply browse the page and look for the specific issue you’d like to report. Then click on the “View Details & Report” and enter the information required. In most cases, you won’t be asked to enter any personal information. Say for instance that you’d like to report a mismatched image in Google News. All you need to do is enter the title of the article associated to that image and the link to our results using our “site:” operator and then click on the “Report it” button. This will ensure that someone on our team will look into the issue and take appropriate actions.

Along with this form we launched an informational page on some of the channels currently available to contact our support team. Keep contacting our team with your suggestions on how we can improve Google News.

Psst...secrets of Google News exposed!

Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

We've enumerated some of truths and myths below, and invite you to visit the Truths & Myths post on the support group for more extensive followup discussion about your experiences with Google News. User Guides Marcela and Abe will be reading and responding to posts over the next few days. We hope that this post and the corresponding support group thread will help many of you improve your content coverage in Google News.

So without further delay, on to truths and myths:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself. There are some tips in our help center designed to help us include more of your images in Google News. We encourage you to check those out if you have had problems getting images included in the past.

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we've crawled it, they won't be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we'll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
Google News is constantly looking for the most recent developments in a story. Making sure we get the latest, breaking news articles is very important. However, whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won't affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won't help. Additionally, our system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story. If we detect that a source is constantly rewriting stories in order to game the system, we will flag the source in our system.

Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
While we will include articles that contain multimedia content, if our crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won't include the article. The bottom line here is that our crawler is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn't text-based, it won't be included in Google News. In the meantime, we're working to find ways to add more multimedia content such as our recent integration with video news from YouTube.

There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
As you've seen above, there are a number of reasons that your articles may not be included in Google News. To help you analyze your coverage, we have Webmaster Tools for news. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can create an account that will show you errors on specific articles.

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
Creating a sitemap for your news articles helps us find your content; if we can't find your content, we can't rank it. Creating a sitemap does not affect your article rankings; but there are still several reasons that creating a sitemap is a good idea. First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl. Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in.

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
Our crawler has been carefully tuned to scour the web for news content. If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. In such cases, the Support team may need to update the crawler so that it can find your new content. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team.

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH
Using AdSense doesn't have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn't be very objective!

We hope this information has been eye-opening, and encourage you to let us know what else you've heard on our Truth & Myths thread.

Up to the minute news with Comments

Posted by Cliff, Ted and Namita, the Comments Team

In the several months since the launch of Comments, we've made some improvements that we wanted to let you know about. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Comments feature allows people mentioned in a story to comment on the articles in question. We think it's a great way to expose even more perspectives to you, the readers of Google News.

First, we've added a link on the Google News homepage that showcases all of the comments that are currently included in Google News.

By clicking on this link, you can review all of the expert comments. It's a great way to catch up on discussion around current news stories.

Also, to make it easier for commentors to submit comments, we've created a contact form to expedite this process. Currently, the ability to comment is only open to people who have been mentioned in a story or are related to an organization mentioned in a story. This form will make it easier for us to gather the information we need from them to get their comments into Google News as quickly as possible.

For more information about the Comments feature, visit our help center pages. And to provide feedback on this, or any other part of Google News, visit our feature suggestions page.

Would you like help with that?

Posted by Inbal Drukker, News Support Team

The Google News Support team works with news publishers and with people who use Google News. We're proud to be the group that can address your concerns and questions, and help get your feedback implemented into the product. We're constantly working to improve how we support you, which is why I'm excited to announce our new Help Center. We've made many changes to it, both to share information and to gather your feedback and suggestions. Here are some of the major updates:

Scannable topics: We've replaced long questions with short headers, so it's easier to find what you're looking for by scanning the topics pages. Reviewing usage of our Help content, we've learned that you prefer to browse topics rather than search for answers using our Search box. Scannable topics are much easier to browse so you'll get the fastest answer.

More content: We've aggregated (pun intended) and added many of the questions we've received over the past few months that weren't on the Help Center, which means we're now more likely to have the answer to your question. If you don't see it, visit our Help Group to search for a similar question which may have been asked, or to ask it yourself.

All-in-one: To keep the flow of communication going between you and us, we'll soon be directing you to a page which lists all the currently available resources you may need to get answers, and how to contact us. We value your ever-helpful feedback, so we encourage you to report issues you may come across with Google News and to keep sending us suggestions for features.

Last but not least, to improve support for our news providers (editors, contributors, news site webmasters), our support group is busy preparing to launch a new and improved Publisher Help Center. Stay tuned for that!

2007: Year in Review

by Yaron Binur, Product Manager

As we're now in early March, it occurs to me that it's still not too late to look back on the past year -- or to look ahead to what's to come in 2008. I look back over last year, and feel happy about what we've accomplished with Google News. And I'm excited to do even more to help you have a great news experience. For me, some of last year's highlights are:

Features
We made some significant changes to several of our language editions, such as offering a new way of visually depicting the news with our image version, and integrating high quality videos into our news stories.

We increased the relevance of Google News by giving people involved in news stories the ability to comment. This feature has given rise to comments from experts across a varied group of stories, with many notable comments from college professors, attorneys, elected officials and others.

Quality improvements
In August we launched improved duplicate detection, making it easier for you to eliminate identical stories from search results. We improved the advanced search capability and launched it internationally, to help you surface the content you care about.

In December we introduced significant ranking improvements to many of our editions, which allows us to properly highlight important local sources in languages where we're including sources from around the world. It also improves our ability to surface the most recent articles published about a breaking story.

News on other properties
A renewed focus in 2007 was to improve the way you get your news on other properties. In October we launched a new iGoogle gadget for a richer and more advanced news experience within iGoogle. We also tried our first experiment in social news by launching a Facebook application where people could both read and share the news.

Publisher improvements
It's important to us to include as much of our publishers' content as possible, so that we can provide a more diverse news experience for you. Our bot can sometimes have difficulty crawling all of the great content from our sources, so in 2006 we launched Webmaster Tools for News, which allows English-language publishers to submit content to Google News and see error reports for articles our bot wasn't able to crawl. In 2007, we enabled Webmaster Tools for publishers in all languages.

While we feel we accomplished a good deal in 2007, we hope to accomplish even more this year. Please keep telling us what you think about our new features, and what new features would really make you happy.

Clarifications on local - for news readers and publishers

Posted by Gina Bonzani, News Support Team

Two weeks ago we launched a new feature that lets you create local sections on your personalized Google News page. After some feedback we've been getting, we wanted to clarify a couple of issues. We want to make sure that it's easy for you to use this feature, but we also want to ensure that publishers know how to best update the information about their sites.

First, I'll address the specific steps that you should take to use the local feature. In both our feedback and some of the press coverage on this feature, there was some confusion about how to actually create a local section. Specifically, a number of people tried to enter a zip code or a city/state combination in our main search bar and did not get the results they wanted. Currently, you must create a local section to get local results. We're working to make this more clear on the site and improve the functionality. In the meantime, here's the step-by-step process to create your own local section.

First, look for the local section on your front page and the local search bar, as you see here:

All you have to do is enter the information in this section and PRESTO! You've got yourself a local section. If you don't see this promotion, you can set up a local section via your personalized page settings. Just access this option using "Personalize this page" or "Edit this personalized page" (if you've already personalized). Once you've clicked on this you'll see a menu similar to this image (US edition only). Click on "Add a local section."

Once you've clicked on this local section link, you'll see a place to enter a zip code or city/state combination. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you'd like to see. Once you click "Add Section" you'll see this section on your personalized Google News page.

And that's it -- you should be up and running with local news from wherever you want it. We're still working to improve this new feature both with our results and the features on our site, so keep the feedback coming!

The other feedback we got came from a number of publishers asking us how they could make sure we get all the great local news they're producing and ensure they shown up in results for their readers. As we explained, most of the work takes place on our side as we read every article to understand what location the story is about. However, we also look to check that against the location of the publisher. If you're a publisher and want to make sure we have all the latest information about your site, please contact our support team. If you notice that we are not including all of your articles, please send us a list of your news sections. If you notice that we don't include location information for your source, let us know what your accurate location is. Finally, if you're not included in News at all, let us know and we'll review your site for inclusion.

We hope the local feature is a interesting and useful feature for you to get information about cities near you or of interest to you. We're always working to improve our product, and appreciate your feedback.

DITL Volume 1: News' First Engineer

Posted by Lucy Zhang, Software Engineer

As one of the first engineers assigned to Google News, I'm excited to kick off the inaugural Day in the Life ("DITL") post. Over the next few months, we hope to bring you a unique window into the world of Google News by publishing more DITL posts from other people who work on News. Our team is diverse and passionate, and we hope that we can show that to you in this series of posts. I've worked on Google News for over three years, and have seen a lot of amazing innovations. So enjoy my description of a typical day here for me at Google....

9:30am: Get into work and check my email. At Google we have engineers from all over the world, so I often receive code reviews and/or questions from those working in India or China. I starred them in my email inbox so I'm reminded to get back to them later in the day.

10:00 - 11:00 am: Attend the News team weekly meeting. Our team's product manager sets a unique agenda every week. We normally use this meeting to do project presentations so the team can learn what each engineer is working on. Sometimes we review recently launched features and forecast upcoming launches. This is also where we sync up with our international offices.

11:30am: The Google News Frontend team meets so each team member can provide a status update on their project tasks and reveal any dependencies that might be holding up their progress.

12:00pm: Usually my office-mates Dan and Chris start to initiate lunch. They like to browse the menus of different cafes on campus and usually pick the one with the best dessert. Once a location is decided, we gather the rest of the team to join us.

12:10pm: We've arrived at Off the Grid cafe. After getting our food, we sit, eat, and chat about the future of online journalism and how we can make Google News better.

1:00pm: After lunch, I like to block off an hour to do code reviews. A code review is when someone else other than the author examines the code for correctness and readability. News has many remote engineers so many code reviews come from India or China. I try to complete these by the end of the day, so they do not have to wait another 24 hours to hear a response.

2:00: Attend a meeting with UX (User Experience) designers, our product manager, and other engineers to discuss design specifications for a new feature. We come up with use cases and list out pros and cons of various solutions. In the end, our goal is to build a feature that is useful.

3:13pm: I'm pager-holder for the week and the pager goes off. The pager goes off when something requires immediate attention since News is 24/7 and every minute counts. The team has built numerous useful monitoring tools and status pages which I use to debug the issue.

4:04pm: Our product manager comes into our office to check on the status of a feature release planned for this week. I inform him that all the pre-launch procedures are being followed and we should be on schedule for launch. He leaves with a big smile.

4:30pm: I get some coding time and work on the implementation for the feature launches I'm responsible for.

6:33pm: An engineer from other project drops by my office to ask questions about how to integrate their product into Google News. I share my experience with him from when we did similar integrations with Google Finance and Archive News Search.

7:00pm: I go grab dinner from No Name cafe and eat at my desk.

8:20pm: I finish replying to some emails before getting on the Google shuttle and head home.

9:30pm - 12am: I normally stay online during this time since this is when some international engineers are getting into work. I try to be available to answer questions using gChat. It is also a good time to get some work done before the new day starts.

All News is Local

Posted by Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineers

Something you already know about Google News is that we crawl thousands of sources from around the world. This means you get as many different perspectives on a story from many perspectives. A while back, we started thinking about how to bring this same diversity of sources to local news, so that "local" doesn't necessarily mean "limited".

Today we're releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code. While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

You can see an example with the latest news from Duluth, Minnesota:




As always, results will be clustered with multiple sources on a story. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results. Our article rankings will also take into account a publication's location so we can promote all the local sources for each story.

This feature is still a bit of an experiment for us, which is why today it’s only available in English. But we hope to launch this in other languages and editions soon. Please let us know what you think!

Following the polls on Super Tuesday

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

If you somehow escaped US electioneering up to this point, you probably won't today, Super Tuesday, when 24 states choose their candidates for the fall election. This will be the largest number of primaries going on at one time in the history of the U.S. electoral system.

Over the last few weeks and months, there has been a massive volume of news coverage, statistics and polls -- and there will be even more today. Our mission is to help organize all of it for you, so you can find what you're looking for. There are a number of ways Google can help you keep track of all the candidates and issues -- from Maps with the latest results, to YouTube videos from voters across the country. You can read all about these initiatives on the Google Blog.

Of course, we want to do our part as well. In addition to all the latest stories from thousands of sources in our new Elections section, we've also put together a gadget that tracks the progress of the candidates in each of the 24 states. Here's an example of how it might look; please note these are not actual results!


In addition to providing up to date information about the results on all the candidates as the polls close, you'll also be able to view this information on Google Maps. You can see the results across the United States, within a particular region, and even as specific as a particular county.

So check it out and let us know what you think.

We want to hear from you!

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

If you're looking for an easy way to let us know what new features you'd like in Google News, look no further. Today, we're launching a new feature request form that will make this process a lot easier. We tried to include many of the most popular and interesting features that people have suggested. Whether it's a new standard section or new search functionality, we want to know what's important to you when you're using Google News. You can select up to 5 choices from this form and if the feature you want is not listed, suggest it with the "I have another idea" box at the bottom of the page. We'll use your ideas to help inform us about what changes to make to News in the coming months.

And for the entire News team, I'd like to thank you for all the feedback you've given us over the years. We hope the form will make this process easier for you to send in your suggestions. Stay tuned to find out which new features are coming soon.