Wednesday, 20 August 2008
News without borders: search results across languages
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.
Thursday, 14 August 2008
More African countries now have their own edition of Google News
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.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Google brings News to its Turkish users
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.
Friday, 8 August 2008
Google News goes to the Summer Games
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.
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)
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.
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Testing... testing... is this on?
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.
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Reflections on the Sichuan earthquake
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.
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