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!