We are excited to announce we will be in Paris from November 27-29, 2012 to be a part of OW2Con. OW2Con is the annual conference for the OW2 consortium, which is an open source foundation focusing on open source middleware components. OpenSocial aligns…
Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them. Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search. Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out the following features:
Your Ad Exchange performance reports are key to understanding your account’s activity and earnings. Sometimes it can be challenging to interpret the wealth of data you’re presented with, so we’re excited to introduce some changes which improve th…
Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder, Google News
Google News launched on September 22, 2002—exactly a decade ago.
Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them. Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.
In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.
As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline). In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.
Take a look back at the past decade in Google News through the top stories from each year and a few notable features that have launched in the interim:
It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. Smartphones and social networks have transformed how news is accessed and sourced, and shifted the relationship between readers and authors. Open journalism is the norm, and aggregation by humans and machines is an integral part of the ecosystem. New technologies such as Hangouts on Air have the potential to connect users, journalists and opinion makers and transform how stories are discussed.
Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.
(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog)
Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager, Google News
The day after the historic 1929 stock market crash, Variety bannered their front page with these words: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” It’s a great headline: pithy, catchy, and expressive of the substance of the story as well as the scale of its consequences. It’s also worth noting that Variety’s editors had a full day to write the headline—millions of readers weren’t trying to search for the story within seconds of hearing about it.
The Web has transformed both how news organizations report information and the way users find it. Imagine if “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG” were used as a headline today by an online news site. Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.
To help solve this problem, today we’re excited to announce a news_keywords metatag. The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.
Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. Taking the Variety example above, news keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.
Keep in mind that this metatag will be one signal among many that our algorithms use to determine ranking. The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool — but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.
You can learn more about getting news_keywords set up by reading our Help Center article.
Today at the London ATS Trading summit we announced the launch of Audience Extension, a new feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) designed to generate more premium revenue for publishers by leveraging their audiences across the web. Audience …
We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:Line Item Bulk Edit: &…
As part of our Google-wide initiative to deliver a new and improved Google experience across all of our products, we’ve been making continuous enhancements to the Ad Exchange. Now, when you log into your account, it will still have the same structure…
Posted by Jeff Walz, Head of University RelationsYesterday afternoon at the 2012 Computer Science Faculty Summit, there was a round of lightning talks addressing some of the research problems faced by Google across several domains. The talks pointed ou…
Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.Available in DFP:Teams: Imagine that your organization o…
Today we’re announcing the new Google Offers app for iPhone. Now, iPhone users can discover, buy and redeem Google Offers, as well as deals from our partners, on-the-go. Some of the features of the new Google Offers app for iPhone include:
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| Browse deals near you in map view, purchase offers directly from the app, and get instant access to all of your deals in “My Offers” |
Download the Google Offers app for iPhone today from The App Store. This app is only available in the U.S.
Posted by Robert Kim, Product Manager, Google Offers
Posted by Enrique Muñoz Torres, Sr. Product Manager, Google Analytics
On Tuesday, June 5th, at 9am – 1pm PST, we will be live streaming DoubleClick Insights – a series of spirited, thought-provoking conversations about the future of digital marketing with leaders from top advertisers, agencies and publi…
Every time I talk to Mitchel Stangl, I learn something new. Mitchel’s a mechanical engineer who uses SketchUp Pro to build massively intricate models of processing and manufacturing facilities. On his last visit to SketchUp HQ, Mitchel helped me impr…
We recently came across some marvelous work from Alexander James International (AJI), an interior design firm in the UK that specializes in the Hotel & Leisure market. Michael Reekie, Senior Interior Designer for AJI, was good enough to provide som…