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.