Google News for Singapore

Posted by Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineer and Andrew McGlinchey, Product Manager

We'd like to welcome Google News Singapore, the newest edition of the Google News family. As with all our new edition launches, the English-language Singapore edition is tailored to provide a mix of locally relevant news as well as globally important events. We hope that our readers in Singapore can now reach the best news destinations on the internet even faster, and that news publishers in Singapore can connect to news readers even better.

This launch also reaffirms the global nature of Google's mission, and in particular the importance of Asia within that vision. At the start of 2008, we had nine editions in Asia: India (English and Hindi), Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel and an Arabic edition for the Middle East. Now, a year later, we have almost doubled our coverage by adding seven and a half editions in Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Pakistan, India (Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam) and Turkey. Why the half? We'll take partial credit for Turkey since it's in Europe as well as Asia.

If you're an English-language news publisher in Singapore -- or any other edition of Google News, for that matter -- and don't see your site on our editions, you can always contact us to request inclusion.

Got questions? Got answers? Check out our new Help Forum.

Posted by Abe Epton, News Support Team

Today we're launching the new version of the Google News Help Forum (formerly known as the Help Group), and we encourage you to check it out and post a question or two. The new forum incorporates a number of features we've heard requested, and we think the new format will make it even easier for questions to find answers. If you'd like to view a post from the previous version of the Forum, you can still search the Help Center for it, and the old URLs will still work. We really appreciate all the great discussions our users and publishers have participated in in our old Group, and we encourage everyone who used the old Group to check out the new Forum.

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.