Green Team prepare the Rose Garden

Over the past two Fridays, the Green Team has been busy in our Rose Garden, working compost into the soil, and discovering the joys of worms, centipedes, slugs and other grubs. The team have put compost and soil conditioner into the rose bed, so that planting of the blue and yellow pansies will be happening this week!! Thanks to Oderings Nursery who have given us a great deal on these plants, and another big thank you to Graeme Wood for all his help with the trailer and extra tools.

Looking Backward: Nominating a new Justice

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

A few minutes ago, the United States Senate voted 68-31 in favor of confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the newest addition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor's confirmation followed three days of debate on the Senate floor, and was preceded by a series of lengthy and widely-reported confirmation hearings in July. A simple search for [Sotomayor] on Google News yields articles from thousands of sources covering this developing story.

Judge Sotomayor will soon become part of an elite group of Americans, as the 111th Justice to serve on the Court. The process by which new Justices are vetted and confirmed for this powerful body has long been a subject of intense media interest. As history was being made this week, I took a look back using News Archive Search's Timeline view for the term [supreme court confirmation]. While browsing the archives, common threads in media coverage of Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings jumped out at me. I've included some articles below from the last 75 years of Supreme Court History.

These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:


Morning Star - Jul 23, 1993


St. Petersburg Times - Aug 13, 1937


The Deseret News. - Jul 5, 1987


Eugene Register-Guard - Mar 21, 1939

Pardon Our Dust: Temporary Issues with Webmaster Tools

Posted by Abe Epton, Publisher Support Team

Google News publishers have long made use of Webmaster Tools to submit and update their News sitemaps, as well as learn more about how Google is crawling their site. Recently, the Webmaster Tools site underwent a major makeover designed to make it easier for publishers to use. As part of this process, Google News is working to improve our interaction with Webmaster Tools and help news publishers take advantage of some of WMT's helpful new features.

Unfortunately, this also means that there are currently a few issues that publishers are seeing. We wanted to let you know what they were, and reassure you that we're working on them. While there may be some sawdust and loose nails lying around at the moment, it won't be long before a sturdy new edifice has been completed, and we think publishers will agree that the hard work will have been worth it. For the moment, however:

• Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" () even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.
• From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.

We apologize for the inconvenience these issues may be causing you. We're working hard to improve the sitemap submission experience, and think you'll be pleased with the results.

Extra! Extra! Updates from our growing newspaper archives

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

Last September on this blog, we announced a new initiative to digitize newspapers and make them accessible and searchable online.

We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. Working with our partners, we've also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others.

Looking for a place to start exploring this rich historical index? How about the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers we've digitized to date.



News Archive Search is an ongoing effort, and we're continuing to work with publishers to add new materials. You can explore this historical treasure trove by searching on News Archive Search or by using the timeline feature after searching on Google News.

Junior School hit by “Earthquake Disaster”

The junior school was hit pretty hard by a very localized Earthquake on Tuesday with desks and chairs tipping over and injured staff and students everywhere. Luckily for us the senior children were safe and sent to assist where they could in the junior school. All this activity was filmed by staff and used as an amazing discussion tool about disasters. All we can say is that it was a good thing that our whole school topic for this term is set around answering the big question of how to survive a disaster. The students all agreed that we are not prepared and we need to do a whole lot of work to find out how we can be. This should be a very interesting topic, one that will generate much discussion at home.

Member of Parliament visits Conductive Education

Clayton Cosgrove MP for Waimakariri visited Addington today to look at the Conductive Education Unit and talk with Teachers and parents of students attending. Mr Cosgrove was contacted by a concerned parent who lives in his electorate.

Our principal Trudy Heath, Dave Ching, NZ Conductive Education Foundation member, and Teachers and Conductors from the Unit spoke with Mr Cosgrove about the history of the Unit, its funding, and the impact of funding cuts on our families. 

Brittany and her Mum, Julie Baker, spent some time, outlining to Mr Cosgrove and the Christchurch Press reporters with him, the consequences for their family in particular. 

At the end of his visit Mr Cosgrove thanked Trudy and her team and said he was now very aware of where our students would be without Conductive Education and was committed to assisting the school raise the profile of our funding issue.

Working with News Publishers

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We're constantly talking with web publishers, including those in the news industry, about how their content is indexed by search engines. Last week in Europe, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." We agree, and that's how things stand today.

More than 25,000 news organizations across the globe choose to make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read -- Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month. If at any point a web publisher feels as though we're not delivering value to them and wants us to stop indexing their content, they're able to do so quickly and effectively. To read more on this issue, see our post on the European Public Policy blog.