Google Data » Googler

Words matter

Googler — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:43:00 +0000

Posted by Jack Hebert, Akash Nanavati and Natasha Mohanty, Software Engineers

Be it poetry or public speech, words matter.

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.

To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results.

Clicking on the speaker's name will take you to a page with even more of their quotes. From there you can search within the quotes by entering a query on the left side of the page. For example, entering [iraq] in the search box will produce quotes from John McCain that mention Iraq.

For a different viewpoint, try Barack Obama's quotes on Iraq.

Visit our user to user forum to tell us about how you're using the quotes feature.

Need Help? Contact our Support Team!

Googler — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Posted by Greta Ghizzo, News Support Team

Last week we launched a new form that will make it easier for users around the world to report an issue with Google News. With the Report an Issue page you’ll be able to send us a quick note to inform us about the problem you’re having with your edition of Google News.

Simply browse the page and look for the specific issue you’d like to report. Then click on the “View Details & Report” and enter the information required. In most cases, you won’t be asked to enter any personal information. Say for instance that you’d like to report a mismatched image in Google News. All you need to do is enter the title of the article associated to that image and the link to our results using our “site:” operator and then click on the “Report it” button. This will ensure that someone on our team will look into the issue and take appropriate actions.

Along with this form we launched an informational page on some of the channels currently available to contact our support team. Keep contacting our team with your suggestions on how we can improve Google News.

Psst…secrets of Google News exposed!

Googler — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:43:00 +0000

Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

We've enumerated some of truths and myths below, and invite you to visit the Truths & Myths post on the support group for more extensive followup discussion about your experiences with Google News. User Guides Marcela and Abe will be reading and responding to posts over the next few days. We hope that this post and the corresponding support group thread will help many of you improve your content coverage in Google News.

So without further delay, on to truths and myths:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself. There are some tips in our help center designed to help us include more of your images in Google News. We encourage you to check those out if you have had problems getting images included in the past.

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we've crawled it, they won't be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we'll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
Google News is constantly looking for the most recent developments in a story. Making sure we get the latest, breaking news articles is very important. However, whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won't affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won't help. Additionally, our system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story. If we detect that a source is constantly rewriting stories in order to game the system, we will flag the source in our system.

Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
While we will include articles that contain multimedia content, if our crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won't include the article. The bottom line here is that our crawler is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn't text-based, it won't be included in Google News. In the meantime, we're working to find ways to add more multimedia content such as our recent integration with video news from YouTube.

There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
As you've seen above, there are a number of reasons that your articles may not be included in Google News. To help you analyze your coverage, we have Webmaster Tools for news. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can create an account that will show you errors on specific articles.

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
Creating a sitemap for your news articles helps us find your content; if we can't find your content, we can't rank it. Creating a sitemap does not affect your article rankings; but there are still several reasons that creating a sitemap is a good idea. First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl. Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in.

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
Our crawler has been carefully tuned to scour the web for news content. If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. In such cases, the Support team may need to update the crawler so that it can find your new content. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team.

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH
Using AdSense doesn't have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn't be very objective!

We hope this information has been eye-opening, and encourage you to let us know what else you've heard on our Truth & Myths thread.

Up to the minute news with Comments

Googler — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:40:00 +0000

Posted by Cliff, Ted and Namita, the Comments Team

In the several months since the launch of Comments, we've made some improvements that we wanted to let you know about. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Comments feature allows people mentioned in a story to comment on the articles in question. We think it's a great way to expose even more perspectives to you, the readers of Google News.

First, we've added a link on the Google News homepage that showcases all of the comments that are currently included in Google News.

By clicking on this link, you can review all of the expert comments. It's a great way to catch up on discussion around current news stories.

Also, to make it easier for commentors to submit comments, we've created a contact form to expedite this process. Currently, the ability to comment is only open to people who have been mentioned in a story or are related to an organization mentioned in a story. This form will make it easier for us to gather the information we need from them to get their comments into Google News as quickly as possible.

For more information about the Comments feature, visit our help center pages. And to provide feedback on this, or any other part of Google News, visit our feature suggestions page.

Would you like help with that?

Googler — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:34:00 +0000

Posted by Inbal Drukker, News Support Team

The Google News Support team works with news publishers and with people who use Google News. We're proud to be the group that can address your concerns and questions, and help get your feedback implemented into the product. We're constantly working to improve how we support you, which is why I'm excited to announce our new Help Center. We've made many changes to it, both to share information and to gather your feedback and suggestions. Here are some of the major updates:

Scannable topics: We've replaced long questions with short headers, so it's easier to find what you're looking for by scanning the topics pages. Reviewing usage of our Help content, we've learned that you prefer to browse topics rather than search for answers using our Search box. Scannable topics are much easier to browse so you'll get the fastest answer.

More content: We've aggregated (pun intended) and added many of the questions we've received over the past few months that weren't on the Help Center, which means we're now more likely to have the answer to your question. If you don't see it, visit our Help Group to search for a similar question which may have been asked, or to ask it yourself.

All-in-one: To keep the flow of communication going between you and us, we'll soon be directing you to a page which lists all the currently available resources you may need to get answers, and how to contact us. We value your ever-helpful feedback, so we encourage you to report issues you may come across with Google News and to keep sending us suggestions for features.

Last but not least, to improve support for our news providers (editors, contributors, news site webmasters), our support group is busy preparing to launch a new and improved Publisher Help Center. Stay tuned for that!

2007: Year in Review

Googler — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 01:08:00 +0000

by Yaron Binur, Product Manager

As we're now in early March, it occurs to me that it's still not too late to look back on the past year -- or to look ahead to what's to come in 2008. I look back over last year, and feel happy about what we've accomplished with Google News. And I'm excited to do even more to help you have a great news experience. For me, some of last year's highlights are:

Features
We made some significant changes to several of our language editions, such as offering a new way of visually depicting the news with our image version, and integrating high quality videos into our news stories.

We increased the relevance of Google News by giving people involved in news stories the ability to comment. This feature has given rise to comments from experts across a varied group of stories, with many notable comments from college professors, attorneys, elected officials and others.

Quality improvements
In August we launched improved duplicate detection, making it easier for you to eliminate identical stories from search results. We improved the advanced search capability and launched it internationally, to help you surface the content you care about.

In December we introduced significant ranking improvements to many of our editions, which allows us to properly highlight important local sources in languages where we're including sources from around the world. It also improves our ability to surface the most recent articles published about a breaking story.

News on other properties
A renewed focus in 2007 was to improve the way you get your news on other properties. In October we launched a new iGoogle gadget for a richer and more advanced news experience within iGoogle. We also tried our first experiment in social news by launching a Facebook application where people could both read and share the news.

Publisher improvements
It's important to us to include as much of our publishers' content as possible, so that we can provide a more diverse news experience for you. Our bot can sometimes have difficulty crawling all of the great content from our sources, so in 2006 we launched Webmaster Tools for News, which allows English-language publishers to submit content to Google News and see error reports for articles our bot wasn't able to crawl. In 2007, we enabled Webmaster Tools for publishers in all languages.

While we feel we accomplished a good deal in 2007, we hope to accomplish even more this year. Please keep telling us what you think about our new features, and what new features would really make you happy.

Clarifications on local – for news readers and publishers

Googler — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Posted by Gina Bonzani, News Support Team

Two weeks ago we launched a new feature that lets you create local sections on your personalized Google News page. After some feedback we've been getting, we wanted to clarify a couple of issues. We want to make sure that it's easy for you to use this feature, but we also want to ensure that publishers know how to best update the information about their sites.

First, I'll address the specific steps that you should take to use the local feature. In both our feedback and some of the press coverage on this feature, there was some confusion about how to actually create a local section. Specifically, a number of people tried to enter a zip code or a city/state combination in our main search bar and did not get the results they wanted. Currently, you must create a local section to get local results. We're working to make this more clear on the site and improve the functionality. In the meantime, here's the step-by-step process to create your own local section.

First, look for the local section on your front page and the local search bar, as you see here:

All you have to do is enter the information in this section and PRESTO! You've got yourself a local section. If you don't see this promotion, you can set up a local section via your personalized page settings. Just access this option using "Personalize this page" or "Edit this personalized page" (if you've already personalized). Once you've clicked on this you'll see a menu similar to this image (US edition only). Click on "Add a local section."

Once you've clicked on this local section link, you'll see a place to enter a zip code or city/state combination. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you'd like to see. Once you click "Add Section" you'll see this section on your personalized Google News page.

And that's it -- you should be up and running with local news from wherever you want it. We're still working to improve this new feature both with our results and the features on our site, so keep the feedback coming!

The other feedback we got came from a number of publishers asking us how they could make sure we get all the great local news they're producing and ensure they shown up in results for their readers. As we explained, most of the work takes place on our side as we read every article to understand what location the story is about. However, we also look to check that against the location of the publisher. If you're a publisher and want to make sure we have all the latest information about your site, please contact our support team. If you notice that we are not including all of your articles, please send us a list of your news sections. If you notice that we don't include location information for your source, let us know what your accurate location is. Finally, if you're not included in News at all, let us know and we'll review your site for inclusion.

We hope the local feature is a interesting and useful feature for you to get information about cities near you or of interest to you. We're always working to improve our product, and appreciate your feedback.

DITL Volume 1: News’ First Engineer

Googler — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:30:00 +0000

Posted by Lucy Zhang, Software Engineer

As one of the first engineers assigned to Google News, I'm excited to kick off the inaugural Day in the Life ("DITL") post. Over the next few months, we hope to bring you a unique window into the world of Google News by publishing more DITL posts from other people who work on News. Our team is diverse and passionate, and we hope that we can show that to you in this series of posts. I've worked on Google News for over three years, and have seen a lot of amazing innovations. So enjoy my description of a typical day here for me at Google....

9:30am: Get into work and check my email. At Google we have engineers from all over the world, so I often receive code reviews and/or questions from those working in India or China. I starred them in my email inbox so I'm reminded to get back to them later in the day.

10:00 - 11:00 am: Attend the News team weekly meeting. Our team's product manager sets a unique agenda every week. We normally use this meeting to do project presentations so the team can learn what each engineer is working on. Sometimes we review recently launched features and forecast upcoming launches. This is also where we sync up with our international offices.

11:30am: The Google News Frontend team meets so each team member can provide a status update on their project tasks and reveal any dependencies that might be holding up their progress.

12:00pm: Usually my office-mates Dan and Chris start to initiate lunch. They like to browse the menus of different cafes on campus and usually pick the one with the best dessert. Once a location is decided, we gather the rest of the team to join us.

12:10pm: We've arrived at Off the Grid cafe. After getting our food, we sit, eat, and chat about the future of online journalism and how we can make Google News better.

1:00pm: After lunch, I like to block off an hour to do code reviews. A code review is when someone else other than the author examines the code for correctness and readability. News has many remote engineers so many code reviews come from India or China. I try to complete these by the end of the day, so they do not have to wait another 24 hours to hear a response.

2:00: Attend a meeting with UX (User Experience) designers, our product manager, and other engineers to discuss design specifications for a new feature. We come up with use cases and list out pros and cons of various solutions. In the end, our goal is to build a feature that is useful.

3:13pm: I'm pager-holder for the week and the pager goes off. The pager goes off when something requires immediate attention since News is 24/7 and every minute counts. The team has built numerous useful monitoring tools and status pages which I use to debug the issue.

4:04pm: Our product manager comes into our office to check on the status of a feature release planned for this week. I inform him that all the pre-launch procedures are being followed and we should be on schedule for launch. He leaves with a big smile.

4:30pm: I get some coding time and work on the implementation for the feature launches I'm responsible for.

6:33pm: An engineer from other project drops by my office to ask questions about how to integrate their product into Google News. I share my experience with him from when we did similar integrations with Google Finance and Archive News Search.

7:00pm: I go grab dinner from No Name cafe and eat at my desk.

8:20pm: I finish replying to some emails before getting on the Google shuttle and head home.

9:30pm - 12am: I normally stay online during this time since this is when some international engineers are getting into work. I try to be available to answer questions using gChat. It is also a good time to get some work done before the new day starts.

All News is Local

Googler — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Posted by Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineers

Something you already know about Google News is that we crawl thousands of sources from around the world. This means you get as many different perspectives on a story from many perspectives. A while back, we started thinking about how to bring this same diversity of sources to local news, so that "local" doesn't necessarily mean "limited".

Today we're releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code. While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

You can see an example with the latest news from Duluth, Minnesota:

As always, results will be clustered with multiple sources on a story. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results. Our article rankings will also take into account a publication's location so we can promote all the local sources for each story.

This feature is still a bit of an experiment for us, which is why today it’s only available in English. But we hope to launch this in other languages and editions soon. Please let us know what you think!

Following the polls on Super Tuesday

Googler — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

If you somehow escaped US electioneering up to this point, you probably won't today, Super Tuesday, when 24 states choose their candidates for the fall election. This will be the largest number of primaries going on at one time in the history of the U.S. electoral system.

Over the last few weeks and months, there has been a massive volume of news coverage, statistics and polls -- and there will be even more today. Our mission is to help organize all of it for you, so you can find what you're looking for. There are a number of ways Google can help you keep track of all the candidates and issues -- from Maps with the latest results, to YouTube videos from voters across the country. You can read all about these initiatives on the Google Blog.

Of course, we want to do our part as well. In addition to all the latest stories from thousands of sources in our new Elections section, we've also put together a gadget that tracks the progress of the candidates in each of the 24 states. Here's an example of how it might look; please note these are not actual results!

In addition to providing up to date information about the results on all the candidates as the polls close, you'll also be able to view this information on Google Maps. You can see the results across the United States, within a particular region, and even as specific as a particular county.

So check it out and let us know what you think.

We want to hear from you!

Googler — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:18:00 +0000

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

If you're looking for an easy way to let us know what new features you'd like in Google News, look no further. Today, we're launching a new feature request form that will make this process a lot easier. We tried to include many of the most popular and interesting features that people have suggested. Whether it's a new standard section or new search functionality, we want to know what's important to you when you're using Google News. You can select up to 5 choices from this form and if the feature you want is not listed, suggest it with the "I have another idea" box at the bottom of the page. We'll use your ideas to help inform us about what changes to make to News in the coming months.

And for the entire News team, I'd like to thank you for all the feedback you've given us over the years. We hope the form will make this process easier for you to send in your suggestions. Stay tuned to find out which new features are coming soon.

Tracking election coverage

Googler — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:07:00 +0000

Posted by David Garnick, News Engineering Team

I'm a bit of a junkie for political news, and of course I follow elections. The U.S. section of Google News covers a broad range of topics that are of interest to a national audience; thus, typically, few stories pertain to elections. There is no simple query that I can use in the News search box that will give me a broad and current selection of stories related to the elections. To provide direct access to extensive coverage of the candidates, the campaigns, and the issues, Google News has launched a new Elections section on our front page. This brings you the top stories on national, state, and local elections throughout the United States.

The Elections section appears on the front page along with all of the previously supported sections. If you've personalized your front page, you can add this new section with a single click of the button following the announcement at the top of the front page. If you navigate to the full Elections section, there is a gadget you can use to "Follow the Candidates." The candidates tab allows you to select the candidates you wish to track. The video, news, and blogs tabs allow you to find content specific to those candidates. The maps tab allows you to follow those candidates on the campaign trail. You can use the button below the gadget to add the gadget to your iGoogle page.

Now I can easily satisfy my appetite for election news, and as a big election season gets underway, I'm excited and proud to be working on the Google News Team to help keep others informed too.

Cricket Scores in Google News

Googler — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:11:00 +0000

Posted by Sadeesh Duraisamy & Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers

We're excited to share a new feature for Google News India: you can now get the latest cricket scores right on the front page! If there's a cricket match going on somewhere in the world (and there always is) you will have the latest information available. And if you want all the cricket news in addition to the latest scores while you're on the Google News front page, you can personalize Google News by creating a custom section. In fact, even if you don't read Google News India, but still want to get the latest cricket scores, simply add a custom section from the India edition to your edition, and you'll be able to see the latest cricket scores on your Google News front page wherever you live. Be sure to check out our Hindi News edition as well.

We hope this gives you your fill of cricket scores and more, so let us know what you think.

New Advanced News search

Googler — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:22:00 +0000

Posted by Sheng Yu and Sean Wan, Software Engineers

Want to find articles from a specific news source? You may not know of some tricks to make Google News do the work for you. Try using our site operator along with a keyword, like this: [site:iht.com Paris]. Or you can also use our advanced news search page. Just type the source name into the news source box and click the search button, and you'll get stories from the source you want.

And if you've ever forgotten some or all of the name of a news source, in the past, you'd have to rack your brain to figure out the complete name first. We kept this in mind when we improved our advanced search. You don't need to spend time trying to remember the complete name of a news source any more. Just tell us the words you know: [source:"new york"]. Then we will return articles from those sources whose name contains these specific words.

You can also use the new, smarter advanced news search page. When you are typing the source name into the source box, suggestions will be shown in a drop-down list. If you select one of the suggested sources, your search results will include only articles from the source. If you just type in some keywords, articles from those sources containing the specific words will be returned.

One more thing: you can also do operator searches and use the advanced search page in all editions now. We hope you enjoy these new features, and we'd love to hear your feedback.

Quantity and quality

Googler — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:15:00 +0000

Posted by Sharad Jain, Software Engineer

The goal of Google News has always been to offer as many perspectives on a story as possible to help you better understand current events. That's why we crawl thousands of sources from around the world. We try to help you find stories in every language, in every country, from every newspaper and for every story. But Google News isn't just about including every story; it's about helping you find the stories that matter most to you. The way we do this is with our news ranking algorithms, which are designed to enable you to make sense of all this information by showing you the most relevant news first.

We are constantly improving our algorithms to bring you a better organized, more relevant selection of the day's news. This is an ongoing process, but in the past few months we have been working on a number of improvements that we hope bring us closer to this goal. While many of these aren't new features that you might notice right away, we hope they'll provide a better experience.

One example we recently released is a new algorithm to help determine the most recent update to a story. In other words, it lets us find something new that's been added to a breaking story. So instead of just seeing the most recent publishing activity for a breaking story, we highlight the sources which brought you the information in the first place. Once there's new information from another source, we update our results so you get any new developments to the story.

Another signal we've added helps us recognize the importance of local context in a story. In order to provide a local angle to global events, we have started actively promoting high quality local reporting in addition to coverage from foreign sources. This means we try to find sources at the scene of a story who are doing original reporting. It may be a national or international story with many sources from around the world reporting on it, but often times one of the best sources of information on a story are those closest to it.

There are quite a few other exciting quality initiatives we are working on, but we don't want to take away all the suspense! So keep reading Google News and sending us your ever-helpful feedback on these changes. Namaste!

Easier-to-use news sitemaps

Googler — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:47:00 +0000

Posted by Andy Golding, News Engineering Team

Hey news publishers, have you checked out Google's Webmaster Tools lately? Did you know that you can submit a sitemap listing specific articles you would like us to include in Google News? Recently, we announced that this capability is available to all publishers in all Google News editions.

Today, we're excited to tell you about a change that makes it easier for publishers to create sitemaps: you can now include articles from multiple hosts in the same sitemap. For example, if you own world.mynews.com, business.mynews.com, and sports.mynews.com, you can submit a single sitemap containing articles from all three hosts; it is no longer necessary to maintain a separate sitemap for each. The sitemap itself can reside on any of the hosts. The only requirement is that all articles in the sitemap be for the same news publication. This was announced on the Webmaster Central blog last month, and we're excited to make it possible for news publishers. This should simplify the process of sitemap submission for many of you.

Going forward, stay tuned for innovations both small and large to help make it easier for you to include your content in Google News. If you have feedback or suggestions for us, please visit our News Help group.

Now in the Czech Republic

Googler — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:15:00 +0000

Posted by Marián Dvorský, Software Engineer

The Czech edition of News was my first 20% project here at Google. Therefore I'm very excited to see it now live at news.google.cz.

Zprávy Google (as Google News is called in Czech) aggregates stories from hundreds of news sources in the Czech language. Stories are presented in sections similar to those in other editions. We have modified the Health section that is common to other editions to include travel and lifestyle articles as well.

I hope our Czech users will find the edition useful. For me it is now time to move on to an another exciting 20% project.

To sign in, or not to sign in: that is the question

Googler — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:27:00 +0000

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

If you rely on getting your daily dose of news from your personalized Google News homepage, here are a couple of things you can do to access it from anywhere in the world. In case you're not familiar, personalizing your Google News homepage allows you to create custom sections that contain stories on a specific topic. You can also add standard sections (such as Business or World) from other regional and language editions. It's a great way to get all of the news you want in one place!

The easiest way to manage your personalized News page is by signing in to your Google Account. This will allow you to access your news page from any computer in the same way you would log in to your Gmail account. Signing in also lets you switch across to our other services quickly and easily. For instance, if you’ve just finished checking your messages on Gmail and want to switch to reading the latest news, all you need to do is click on the News tab that is displayed at the top of the page and you’ll be redirected to your personalized Google News page.

The neat thing about Google News is that it lets you personalize your News page even if you decide not to sign in to your Google Account. However, keep in mind that by choosing this option, you’ll only be able to save and view your personalized News page only from the computer you’re using. Therefore, if you’ve personalized your News page on your work computer, you won’t be able to view it using your home computer.

Another limitation of not signing in to your Google Account is that you’ll lose all the settings and changes made to your news page any time you clear your cookies. To prevent this from happening, after you’re done customizing your news page, you can click on the link at the bottom of the homepage that says "Share your personalized News with a friend" and send it to yourself. By saving the URL of this version of Google News in your Inbox, you can access your personalized Google News page from other computers by simply retrieving the email that was sent to you. Just remember to resend this link to yourself anytime you make changes to your news page so that you’ll always have the most up-to-date URL of your personalized Google News homepage.

If you feel this is too much of a hassle, then I recommend you sign in to your Google Account to create your personalized News page. It’s easier, faster and only one click away from Gmail and all other Google products.

Add Google News to Your Site

Googler — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:58:00 +0000

Posted by Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer

If you are a web site owner, a blogger, or a professional site designer, take a look at the latest creation from the AJAX Search API team. With just a few clicks, anyone can configure and add a sleek looking Google NewsBar to their site.

"NewsBar" frameborder="0">Try it out.

The NewsBar is designed with your needs in mind. It can be configured in a horizontal mode where it delivers a continuous stream of news headlines to your site. The vertical mode delivers both news headlines and snippets. The NewsBar is perfect for your topical sites or blogs. For instance, if you are following the Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton race, try this NewsBar.

If you are a professional developer and want to use some of the more advanced features of the NewsBar, there is a complete developer guide that will walk you through all of the options. If you run a blog on Blogger, the NewsBar is already built in. To add it to your blog, just edit your blog's layout, and add the "Newsreel" page element.

A few controls that might complement your use of the NewsBar are, The YouTube VideoBar, The LocalSearch Control for Google Maps, the Slideshow Control, and the Dynamic Feed Control.

Get your news fix on your iGoogle page

Googler — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:46:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Liu, Jin-Ho Kim, Jaeho Kang, Software Engineers

Lots of people love small, portable, sexy gadgets, and that's exactly what we've just created. We're not talking hardware, of course -- what we're introducing is the iGoogle News gadget.

The iGoogle News gadget shows your favorite Google News in a small-screen format, complete with news headlines, snippets, and thumbnails, grouped by news clusters. If you're really into a particular story, there are links to see the full text and related news in a cluster, or more stories in the same category.

It's easy to add the gadget to iGoogle so you can read daily news alongside your mail and other favorite feeds. It can also be displayed on partner sites, or even added on your own web pages using iGoogle syndication technology.

The iGoogle News gadget uses tabs to display different news sections separately in its own tabs, and you can customize the news sections you want to see. You can also create custom sections by entering query terms in the "edit settings tab" (the "+" tab). The gadget allows you to reorder tabs by dragging and dropping, just as you can do with gadgets on your iGoogle page.

You can also select the news editions you want to see and easily add multiple news gadgets to your iGoogle page. Customize each of them, and enjoy reading Google News from multiple countries at a glance. The new News gadget has been localized to 19 languages and supports 38 News editions (more coming). We've also added it to iGoogle as a default gadget on several domains. Add it to your existing iGoogle page.We hope you enjoy this gadget, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

Google News goes social

Googler — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:26:00 +0000

Posted by Tina Huang and Dan Meredith, News Team Engineers

Whether it is from our homepage, one of our RSS feeds, or on a mobile device, Google News seeks to connect people with the news that matters to them -- wherever they may be. As part of that goal we are pleased to announce the Google News Application for Facebook. This experimental application enables users to create custom sections or select from a set of pre-defined topics, then browse and share stories with their friends on Facebook. We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience. Enjoy!

Catching the news as it breaks

Googler — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:34:00 +0000

Posted by Abraham Epton, News Support Team

I recently moved about two thousand miles across the country, and aside from the lack of good pizza, one of the most disorienting things about having moved is not knowing what's going on back home. That's why I'd like to tell you about one of my favorite Google tools, Google Alerts, which makes staying current as simple as checking your email every morning.

I use Alerts to keep track of news about Chicago politics, but the beauty of Alerts is that you can use it to look for anything that appears in a news story, blog post, Google Groups thread or anywhere else on the Internet. Just go to google.com/alerts and enter the term or terms you're interested in, along with the sources you'd like to see results from, how often you want to receive the alerts and your email address. You can create up to 1,000 alerts per email address, and you can update your preferences at any time by following the links at the bottom of any Alerts email you receive.

However, you can use Alerts for much more than checking up on shenanigans in the 1st Ward. If you're in a media-sensitive environment, such as a political or public relations campaign, you can create alerts that let you know whenever you or your client appear in the headlines - as soon as the story breaks. You can be the first to know when something happens to your favorite baseball player, when a review appears for a new movie you'd like to see, or when a new lolcats site goes live.

But Alerts are also very useful for news publishers and webmasters who want to track the inclusion of their content in Google News. Using our search operators -- like the site: operator, which returns search results from a specific domain (i.e. searching for "site:nytimes.com" will return all articles from the New York Times) -- a news publisher can get a daily email listing a selection of articles from their site that made it into Google News. And of course, anyone can use Alerts to notify them when a new post goes live on their favorite news site, or when something happens involving one of their competitors.

With millions of pages being updated every day on the still-nascent Web, it can be difficult for mere mortals to stay up-to-date. Thankfully, with Alerts, you can rely on the world's largest search engine to help you out.

News sitemaps for publishers around the world

Googler — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:56:00 +0000

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, News Support Team

If you're a news publisher and want greater control over how your articles get included in Google News, we've got a great opportunity for you: Today we made Google News sitemaps available globally. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now directly submit your most recent articles via News sitemaps in all the languages we support. You can also specify keywords for each article to tell us more about them so we can better place them in the appropriate news section. You'll get error reports specific to Google News explaining any problems we experienced crawling or extracting articles from your site. And you'll receive additional information on the types of queries that lead Google News users to your site.

Why should I use News sitemaps? So that you can tell us which articles you'd like us to crawl.

When should I submit my articles? As early as possible. You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner we can crawl and extract them. The result is that you'll boost your publishing power, and we'll process your most recent articles more quickly, since we recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.

How do I submit a News sitemap? Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn't included in Google News, you can request inclusion.

Sounds good. How do I check the status of my submitted News sitemap? Once we've verified site ownership through your Webmaster Tools Account, you can view details about your site, including error reports, from the Dashboard by clicking on your site link in the Site column and then clicking the Sitemaps tab.

What if I don't use News Sitemaps? We don't favor sites that use a News sitemap over those that don't. We still crawl all news sites quickly. However, a News sitemap is a great tool to give you greater control over how your content appears in Google News and to alert you to any errors we might encounter when we try to crawl your site.

What if I have more questions about News sitemaps? Take advantage of all these benefits by submitting your articles today by visiting our Help Center for Publishers.

In case you can't tell, we're pretty excited about this new feature. We think News sitemaps can be a real help to publishers and we're glad we can make them available to more publishers. Let us know what you think -- we'd love to hear from you.

First click free

Googler — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:31:00 +0000

Posted by Christina Cacioppo, News Support Team intern

As a college student, I use Google every day – email, news, documents and spreadsheets – you name the product, and I probably use it. This has made my summer internship with the Google News Support team even more illuminating. Though I thought I knew the ins and outs of many Google products (and there are lots of them), I'm actually only a beginner.

The News Support team interacts with users on a daily basis; we’re the go-to people for help and troubleshooting for our readers and publishers. We work hard to provide a comprehensive experience for Google News readers - from occasional surfers to news junkies. Whether we’re adding new sources or supporting new features (like video!), users are one of our primary concerns. Does a certain source have original articles that you will be interested in? Will you be able to access these articles?

One feature I’ve become more aware of is First click free. If you aren’t familiar, First click free is a way for publishers to share their subscription-only content with Google News readers. All articles that are accessed from Google News are allowed to skip over the subscription page.

In practice, this means that when you click on a link from Google News, you'll be able to see the article without receiving a prompt to login. If you would like to read more from the same source and choose to click on another story, you'll be taken to a registration prompt. We like to think of First click free as a simple system that allows you to test drive a news source before signing up on their site.

Finally, if publishers of subscription-based sites aren’t a part of our First click free program, we’re still happy to include their content – we’ll just tag the source as “(subscription)” to let you know that when you click on that article, you'll be directed to a subscription page.

If you love the current features of Google News like First click free (or if you don’t) you can share your thoughts with us on the Google News group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Getting even more news via feeds

Googler — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:24:00 +0000

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

A few weeks ago we blogged about how Google News personalization works. Now let's take a look at getting the most out of Google News feeds.

For one thing, you can get articles from your favorite news source directly on your iGoogle page. Here’s what you need to do: perform a Google News search using our site: operator. In the results page click on the link "RSS" or "Atom" located on the lefthand side of your screen. You’ll be taken to a new page that lets you choose where to receive this feed. You can add this feed to your iGoogle page, your favorite newsreader or another application you like.

Remember that you can subscribe to feeds for any sections of your personalized Google News homepage, or for any of the queries you perform in Google News. Another very nifty use of feeds: you can also subscribe to the content of almost all of our 41 editions. So if you speak another language, or just get a kick out of reading news headlines in different languages, you can set up as many feeds as you like for as many topics as you like. For instance, let’s say that you only care about articles on “Google” coming from the Italian edition, but don’t want to create a dedicated section on your Google News homepage for this topic. Here’s what you can do:

- go to the Italian edition of Google News using the link available at the bottom of our homepage
- perform a search for “Google"
- click on the RSS or Atom feed links in the results page (placed in the same location for all our editions)
- subscribe to the feed.

Don’t forget to check out our Terms of Use and feel free to post on our Help Group to share ideas and tips from other news fans.

Would you like video with that?

Googler — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:10:00 +0000

Posted by Lucy Zhang, News Engineering Team

One of our goals at Google News is to offer as many different perspectives on the news as possible. That means bringing content from multiple sources together in a way we hope you find to be organized and relevant. Now we're adding video to the mix: we're showing related news videos along with our news articles to give you a broader spectrum of info available. You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there.

Today, viewing news videos or other content types on the web can be a frustrating experience. You often get videos that don't play, sites that require different video player downloads, or have misleading descriptions of the content. That's why we're working with YouTube so you can easily view online videos without any downloads required and regardless of what browser you're using.

For our initial launch, we have included several top news sources such as CBS, Reuters, and a number of local Hearst TV stations. Over the next few months, we'll continue to add new sources as fast as we can. Right now we're just offering this addition in the U.S., the UK, and Ireland; we hope to make it available in other languages and editions soon.

We're excited to add this to your Google News experience, so give it a try and let us know what you think.

What’s on your personalized News page?

Googler — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:29:00 +0000

Posted by Gina Bonzani, News Support Team

I "grew up" in Google supporting News and communicating directly with publishers and readers. One thought I’ve seen over and over is that people want to be able to see the news that interests them the most. And a great way to do that is to personalize your Google News homepage.

One of the easiest ways to personalize the News homepage is to move the sections that you most like to read to the top of your page and remove the sections you don’t. For me, that means no Sports section. Or, if you’re interested in a particular topic, you can use personalized News to create a custom section using a keyword. Many Google News readers use this feature to track their favorite sport or team. Others use custom sections to track politics, specific politicians or their own hot button issues. You can even get custom sections with articles from certain publishers (check out the search for site:nola.com), or articles written by sources from a certain state or country (like location:CA, for California). News publishers can even use custom sections to track which articles we’re crawling from their site.

I myself will be using a custom section to help me plan for my Jamaican vacation later this summer. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a wild season for hurricanes, so I’ve set up a custom section using the keywords [atlantic hurricane]. This section will help me stay up to date to see whether the season turns out as badly as predicted. (Even if I have to brave gale-force winds and rain for a couple of days, I’ll still have fun!)

Finally, if you use a feed reader (such as Google Reader) to read your news, you can get an RSS or Atom feed from your custom News section. Just click into your custom section and click on either the RSS or Atom link on the lefthand side of the page. For more info about feeds, check out our online help content.

We’d like to hear about how you're using personalized News to get the news that interests you. Visit the Google News group to tell everyone about your most creative or interesting personalized News section.

Perspectives about the news from people in the news

Googler — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:32:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Meredith and Andy Golding, Software Engineers, News Team

We wanted to give you a heads-up on a new, experimental feature we'll be trying out on the Google News home page. Starting this week, we'll be displaying reader comments on stories in Google News, but with a bit of a twist...

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

As always, Google News will direct readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic. From bloggers to mainstream journalists, the journalists who help create the news we read every day occupy a critical place in the information age. But we're hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that -- whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates-- a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.

We're beginning this only in the US and then, based on how things go, we'll work to expand it to other languages and editions. We're excited about the possibilities of this new feature and we hope you are too, so if you've been covered in a news article please send us your comments and we'll work with you to post it on Google News.

Google News for mobile

Googler — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:50:00 +0000

Posted by Asif Zahir, Product Team

We launched Google News for mobile devices last year to bring you access to the news you want, whenever you want. You can search for and browse through your favorite news headlines, all optimized for viewing on a mobile phone. You can even customize the homepage to add news sections that you care about.

What I like to keep in mind, though, is not just how convenient Google News for mobile can be, but how essential. One of our engineers was recently traveling through Africa when he ran into a loyal Google News user. When the Googler asked the local if he knew that Google News was available on mobile, the local guy replied with a puzzled look: "Of course -- how else would you get to it?" Well put, since nearly 9% of the world accesses the Internet via a mobile device.

Since then, we've launched Google News for mobile in 20 countries and are working to make it available in many more - so stay tuned if your country isn't yet covered. If you're living in Brazil, Sweden and Norway, I hope you're enjoying any of these three most recently launched versions! And if you happen to be reading this and you're a publisher of mobile news content we haven't yet discovered, we'd love to hear from you.

The News Discussion Help Group

Googler — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:00:00 +0000

Posted by Frances Lewis, News Support Team

Got a question about Google News, or are you curious about how to start personalizing your News page to get the stories you care most about? It doesn’t matter if you’re an avid user or a life-long publisher - we have the place for you. The Google News Discussion Group takes questions of all shapes and sizes. With so many readers out there, it only makes sense to have a home for helping one another use Google News better.

The Group is also a way for us to step in and help you when others can’t, as well as a great way for us to hear about the new features you all are asking for. Don’t understand a new feature? Want to ask for a different one? The Group is the place to do it.

Some of you may have already recognized me as the Google News Guide in the group. Though I’ll be heading off to law school soon, I want to introduce the new guide in town: Let's make Marcela feel welcome. And if you haven’t already joined, what are you doing right now?

In short, whether you want to know why Hindi appears to be spelled incorrectly on the homepage, or how to use our first-click free option as a publisher, do come visit.

Empowering publishers with a new Help Center

Googler — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:22:00 +0000

Posted by Tanya Keen, News Support Team

How do you keep thousands of Google News publishers informed about getting their content included in Google News? In September 2006 we launched our first version of a Help Center for Publishers. Since then, Google webmaster tools expanded their offerings to enable news publishers who are already included in Google News to submit a News Sitemap. Not only does this allow publishers to control which articles go to Google News; it also allows them to get unique error reports detailing which articles were successfully crawled, and if they weren't included, why not.

So we've streamlined the way news publishers can make sure their content gets picked up by our crawlers.

Now we've adapted our Help Center for publishers to get better educated about Google webmaster tools. Publishers can now more easily let us know about changes they make to their site, including name, location or domain updates. We've also clarified how publishers go about removing an article or image from Google News, like in those cases when something has been published by mistake and the article has since been recanted. And if you were confused by our old contact forms (so what *do* I put in the state/province field of the "Send us your news site" form?), we think you'll like the ease-of-use of our new contact forms.

If you love our new Help Center, or if you don't, you can share your thoughts with us on each and every Help page you see. Just look for the "Was this helpful?" text at the bottom of the Help article to share your opinions with us. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

News is forever global

Googler — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:10:00 +0000

Posted by Jaya Jha, Associate Product Manager

I was pretty excited when I found out that one of my first projects here was going to be to launch Google News in Hindi. Over 300 languages are spoken in India, and the chance to build a local product that people I knew would find useful was a pretty thrilling challenge. That one launch taught me a lot of things about how issues and challenges vary according to region, users and languages. It made it clear that users want news in their language, presented in a way that they appreciate the best, highlighting content that is most relevant to them. We also want Google News to give you the ability to find out what's happening locally in any part of the world, and give you the means to see a wide variety of global viewpoints on local news.

When and where to create a new edition of Google News is a complex process. We start by looking at a number of different factors in deciding where to launch next, but in the end, the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once we've decided on our next edition, we start adding sources to our news crawl. We try to identify as many news sites as possible prior to launch, and then add to those as publishers and users suggest other news sites to us once we're live. While the news sites in a given country are in the native language, we still need to translate all the other pages that make Google News possible, from navigation to help pages, into the new language. After that we do plenty of testing, and post-launch we work to improve each site with more sources and better results.

So far our news internationalization team has built Google News for 18 languages, 41 editions. Most recently, we've added a Greek version of News to our list of international editions. Of course, there are always more languages to offer, more countries to reach, more features to be built for each edition, and more content to be organized and made accessible. We look forward to bringing you many more changes and improvements in the coming months.

Viewing the world through images

Googler — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:07:00 +0000

Posted by Lieping Tang, Software Engineer, Google News

One of the goals of Google News is to enable readers to read the news in the way that works best for them. In looking at how people use Google News and based on feedback we've received, we've found that many people prefer to read the news in a more visual way. As a result, over the last few months we have been working on Google News Image Version

The Image Version of News lets you view and explore the top headlines of the day through photos instead of just text.

When you roll over an image on the left, it exposes the full snippet and link to the related article on the right side of the page. Clicking on an image will take users directly to the article the image came from. In addition, users can search for image search results. For example, searching for Iraq in Image View would give the following results.

Even if you prefer a standard headlines page, viewing News through Images can be very useful. One classic example is sports. If you want to see the latest action, Image version lets you view the photos for a given team or for a specific game.

We're pretty excited to add this to the Google News experience, so give it a try and let us know what you think!