Google Data » Google News

Introducing Google News Lite mode — faster news for slower networks

James Morehead — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 13:00:00 +0000

Posted by James Morehead, Product Manager, Google News

There are many parts of the world, like India, where slow 2G and 3G mobile networks are the norm. In places like this, when news breaks you’ll likely wait, and wait, and wait for articles to load on your smartphone. That’s why, starting this week, Google News and Weather for Android is introducing a new feature called Lite mode to help many of India’s 200 million smartphone users stay connected with news from around the world and in their local communities. We’ll be rolling this out to other countries in emerging markets in the coming months.

In the full (normal) mode of Google News, as seen below, we aggregate headlines, images and related content, making it fast and easy for people to find articles they care about. In the new Lite mode things look a little different — we keep the headlines and trim the rest of the components down to their essentials so that the app loads more quickly (and uses less than one-third of the data). When people read an article in Lite mode, they’ll also benefit from Google’s previously announced faster and lighter mobile web pages. By default Lite mode triggers automatically when a slower network is detected (users can also choose to control Lite mode directly).

Lite mode is part of our overall goal to provide news that matters to people around the world. A couple of months ago we started providing local news sources to users in all Google News editions globally (71 countries and 38 languages), building on an announcement back in May of a Local Source tag that surfaces local sources for national stories.

We’re also working to bring news to people in their local languages. In India, we embarked on this effort back in 2007 with Hindi and have since expanded to include Malayalam, Tamil, Telegu and English, from more than 1,000 India-based publishers.

We plan to bring Lite mode to users in Brazil and Indonesia later this year, and more places next year.

Putting a Spotlight on Local News Sources

James Morehead — Mon, 09 May 2016 10:00:00 +0000

Posted by James Morehead, Product Manager, Google News

TL;DR Google News has launched a “Local Source” Tag to surface local coverage of major stories.
Local news publishers play a critical role in covering the stories that impact us every day in our cities, schools and neighborhoods. Local reporters are often members of the communities they serve, bringing additional context and perspective to a story. Local news is also important to our users: according to the March 2015 Pew Research study Local News in a Digital Age, which looked at three metro areas across the U.S., “nearly nine-in-ten residents follow local news closely—and about half do so very closely”.

With more than 75,000 news sources, many of the publishers in Google News specialize on specific topics and locales. The local section in Google News surfaces content from regional papers to hyper-local blogs that otherwise wouldn’t appear in national news.

But not all local stories stay local. When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be difficult for local sources to be heard even after they’ve done the legwork and research to break a story. Consistent with our goal to surface diverse perspectives, we’re excited to share that a new "Local Source" tag is now live across all Google News editions. This new feature brings greater exposure for local news outlets reporting on stories that have gone national. "Local Source" articles are identified automatically by looking at where a publisher has written about in the past and comparing that to the story location. You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps.

A great example of hyperlocal news is 9-year-old reporter Hilde Lysiak. Hilde made headlines when she reported on the story of a murder in her hometown which she published on her own local news site -- Orange Street News (AMP-enabled to load really fast on mobile). Her reporting attracted the attention of major newspapers and morning shows like Good Morning America after she was criticised for being too young to cover hard news. It was one reason we invited Hilde to visit the Googleplex on World Press Freedom Day 2016. And just like Hilde, at Google News we are committed to connecting people to the news that matters most to them -- be that local, national or international.

9-year-old Hilde Lysiak visited Google on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2016.

AMPlifying the News

James Morehead — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Maricia Scott, Engineering Director, Google News

At its heart, Google News is about keeping people up-to-date with what is going on in the world and providing news from diverse perspectives. But this goal is meaningless unless we get the reading experience right. For too many people, reading the news on their mobile devices can be slow and clunky, forcing them to abandon a site. That’s why we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short) - an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.

In the few months since AMP launched, thousands of publishers have embraced this new format and are regularly publishing AMP-versions of their content. In February Google started making it easy to find those AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience. Today we will be doing the same thing in Google News on all our mobile platforms -- Web, Android and iOS.

So - what’s new? At the top of the page, there is a new AMP carousel filled with important headlines and stories of the day. Users can browse up to 14 headlines there quickly, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which is optimized for fast-loading AMP articles. In the viewer, people can also swipe to continue reading other stories from the carousel. Within the regular News stream, AMPlified articles are labelled with the AMP lightning bolt icon. That way, users can know these will be fast even before they click.

Our tests have shown that AMP documents load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than the equivalent non-amp’ed result. In many cases these stories will load instantly. That adds up to a win for publishers and users. While we can’t expand the amount of time in the day, with AMP we can help users consume more content in the time they do have. It is also great for publishers because people will read more and click on more stories when they know they will load fast, driving more traffic to a publisher’s site.

We’re starting AMPlification with our English US Edition - more languages and editions will be rolling out soon.

Spreading the News in New Languages

Maggie Shiels — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Posted by Brian Kemler, Product Manager

The next billion internet users are from all countries and corners of the globe. We want Google News to be there to greet them in their own languages to help satisfy their thirst for news.

Google News already supports 28 languages spanning 45 countries. Over the next few days we will add seven new language editions. Romanian is the first followed by Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Thai. This effort will connect a potential new audience of over 260 million people to reporting that matters to them, delivered in their mother tongue on the web or our native Android or iOS mobile apps.

Whatever country people come from or language they speak, Google News is one place they turn to to discover facts, views and perspectives on the stories they care about. With these new editions, we hope we can help bring the news closer to more of our users. Look out for other language editions in the next few months.

Update, December 10th, 2015; Google News added 2 more languages, Slovak and Slovenian, bringing the total number of supported languages to 37.

Google News & Weather now on the Play store with a new look

Maggie Shiels — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 22:37:00 +0000

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, News & Social Team

UPDATE: The News & Weather App is now available on iOS here.

News happens 24/7. To keep up with a fast-paced news cycle, you need a fast-paced app. That was our objective in updating Google News and Weather. It makes the news easier to browse, simpler to digest, and more easily tailored to the news you care about.

Upgrade to the latest version of the app or download it from Google Play here -- including a new tablet version -- for the best of Google News:

Swipe through categories like Business, Technology and Sports or add your own sections for specific topics or places
Tap into any story for a variety of viewpoints, including in-depth articles, op-eds, and local perspectives
Get comprehensive coverage from over 65,000 publications worldwide, and a choice of more than 60 country-specific editions
Sign in with your Google account to take all your customizations with you when you access Google News from any device—phone, tablet, or desktop

We’re rolling out the app to all compatible Android devices and locations globally over the next few days, so stay tuned. We want as many users as possible to get a high quality Google News experience and look forward to launching on other platforms soon.

Introducing the Google News Publisher Center

Maggie Shiels — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 16:15:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

UPDATE: And even more good news as the Publisher Center is now up and running in all countries where Google News has an edition. (Dec 16 2014)

UPDATE: The Publisher Center is now available for publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain as well as in all 21 countries where a Google News edition is available in English. (October 27 2014)

If you are a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time. Until now, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might not have discovered them unless you told us. And that meant they might not have shown up in Google News, which in turn could have resulted in readers not seeing your great content. To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make changes to our record of your news site using the just-launched Google News Publisher Center.

With the Publisher Center, you can benefit from better discovery and classification of your content and you can directly make the following changes:

Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014)
Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)

Try it out, or learn more about how to get started.

At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t. Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.

Helping Local News Thrive

Maggie Shiels — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:02:00 +0000

Posted by Richard Gingras
Senior Director, News & Social Products

In the digital era it’s easy to read stories from around the globe connecting us to a million different views and opinions. But what does that mean for local news? Where does the so called “Daily Bugle” fit into our regular diet of news consumption?

Well, despite the plethora of media outlets, most people cite the local paper as one of their top news sources. This is underlined by a National Newspaper Association survey that came out this month showing that two-thirds of residents in small towns across America depend on their local paper for news and information.

In order to ensure that community newspapers can endure, Google has developed a landmark deal with the Local Media Consortium. The partnership means this industry body - made up of more than 800 daily newspapers and 200 local broadcast stations - can tap into the power of Google’s ads technology to help fund and support the local journalism that so many people cherish and rely on.

For me that local touchstone is the Los Altos Town Crier and the Mountain View Voice, which help keep me up-to-date on the latest shenanigans over a new building development, news about the local high school sports teams, and the ever-fascinating police log.

To find out more details on this partnership, visit our DoubleClick Publisher blog.

Designing News for you on the go

Maggie Shiels — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News and Social

Increasingly people are reading News “on the go” and using their smartphones to keep abreast of the latest happenings around the globe. Over the next few days Google News readers on Android and iOS devices will start to see a beautiful new version of the mobile web app that will provide an improved overall experience resulting in a kind of real time news desk for you on your phone.

Here are just some of the highlights:

Improved overall look-and-feel making it easier to read and track separate stories.
Ability to customize the webapp to suit your taste by changing the theme from light to dark, the font size and opting for a larger “story card” with more information per story at your fingertips (from the Settings menu, at top right).
Simplified navigation to any section within News; just click on the Google News icon (top left) to see a list of available sections (including any custom sections you created).
Easier integration with Google Feedback located in the menu at the top right.

Additionally we have ensured that some favorite desktop features have been included such as:

A weather gadget in the Local section.
The popular “Editors Picks” option.
Social posts from Google + related to the story are included in the article cluster.

We’re launching in the US first and plan to bring the same experience to all our international editions soon.

All this goodness is packaged in a browser so give it a try by just visiting news.google.com from the Chrome/Safari browser on either Android or iOS phones.

A reminder about promotional and commerce journalism

Google News Blog — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:59:00 +0000

Posted by Richard Gingras, Sr. Director, News & Social Products

Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.

Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines. Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.

If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

A better Google News experience on tablets

Unknown — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:36:00 +0000

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News[Edited 02/13/2013] Update: The new Google News experience for tablets is now available in most English editions worldwide. Hope you enjoy it!There’s something special about reading news on your tablet. Indeed, swiping through Google News on your tablet is a comfortable and effective way to find more articles from great publications that satisfy your needs and tickle your serendipitous interests. Starting today, Google News feels even more natural and fluid on tablet devices. For example:

You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap “Explore in depth” to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story.
We’ve also added more breathing room between articles, making it easier to spot the stories you really care about.

We think these improvements will help Google News send even more visits to news sites (six billion per month and counting).

To give it a try, just visit news.google.com with your Nexus 7, Nexus 10, or iPad.

Improving news search with expandable results

Unknown — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:29:00 +0000

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:

Click-to-expand news results clusters: Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster. Click on the “Show more” link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for.
Multimedia: Within some of the expanded results clusters you’ll see a bar of videos and photos that relate to each cluster’s content. Click on any of these for more coverage of the story.
Layout updates: The cluster image now appears on the left and the source information has been moved to below the article links for better readability.

You can try this out by doing a search on Google News or by clicking on the “News” filter on the web search results page. We hope you like these changes and that they improve your experience searching the news.

Google News turns 10

Unknown — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:21:00 +0000

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.

Google News today

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)

A newly hatched way to tag your news articles

Unknown — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:10:00 +0000

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.

Updates to Google News US Edition: Larger Images, Realtime Coverage and Discussions

Google News Blog — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager, Google News

When a story breaks, Google News is designed to give you the most relevant articles from a variety of sources --- from national news outlets, to local points of view, to expert opinion pieces. To continue to expand your views on the news, we are adding three new features for those using our US edition: larger images on our main page; a new realtime coverage page to surface the latest articles and commentary; and relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective.

Get coverage in real time
Our new realtime coverage page is now available for every news story as soon as they become available to Google News.

See relevant comments on top stories
Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we're starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

If you'd like to try these new Google+ features in News, it's easy to upgrade here. That said, if you prefer your Google News to contain just news stories and no Google+ posts, you can either log out of Google or turn off the display of Google+ posts via the Google News settings page.

We're rolling out all of these features over the next week, so don't worry if you don't see them immediately. Today's updates are the latest examples of how we're working to provide users with a beautiful, consistent experience across Google. So we hope you enjoy them.

Update 9/24/2012:Larger images and real time coverage will begin rolling out to all editions. In addition, Google+ posts relevant to individual stories will be available in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

A new way to access quality content online

Google News Blog — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:21:00 +0000

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

Publishers get paid for hosting surveys. A number of publishers, such as the The Texas Tribune, the Star Tribune and Adweek have already started running these microsurveys on their sites.

So what’s the point of these questions? From international brands to local food trucks, every business owner wants to make important decisions with their customers’ feedback in mind. That’s why we’ve created Google Consumer Surveys, a new business-facing product that makes custom market research easy. It enables companies to ask questions (the ones you'll later see on your screen) and get back quantitative results quickly, accurately and cost-effectively. Companies have already been using it to research everything from online shopping behavior (Lucky Brand Jeans) to gluten-free baking mixes (King Arthur Flour), and to assess brand awareness (Timbuk2) and inform product development (479 Popcorn). Google shares the money these companies spend with our publisher partners.

The idea behind Google Consumer Surveys is to create a model that benefits everyone. You get to keep enjoying your favorite online content, publishers have an additional option for making money from that content, and businesses have a new way of finding out what their customers want.

If you’re a publisher interested in running microsurveys on your site, let us know.

Sending us feedback is now much easier!

Unknown — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:36:00 +0000

Posted by Mariko Suzuki, Google News Strategist Do you have any feedback or suggestions you would like to share with the Google News Team? We always love to hear from you, so we made submitting feedback much easier.

Simply click the “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of Google News pages. The Google Feedback gadget will appear, and you can leave us general comments, problem reports or feature suggestions. The feedback gadget will also help you send us a screenshot if you want to draw our attention to a specific aspect of the site. Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.

Although we won’t be able to reply to your comments individually, your feedback will help us create a better Google News experience. This tool will be launching worldwide, beginning with the U.S. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Announcing the 2012 Google News elections section

Unknown — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager Who just endorsed whom? What do the latest polls say? How much money did they raise this quarter? Keeping up with the 2012 elections in the U.S. and staying abreast of breaking developments can be quite a task in today’s fast-paced news cycle. So today, we’re excited to continue our tradition of supporting you during elections season. Google News is launching an Elections section on its homepage which will organize and present elections coverage as it grows through the general election -- Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

The Elections section will be visible by default for all US users and will be located beneath the Health section. It will bring readers the latest and most relevant news stories, using all of the ranking intelligence that users have come to expect of Google. You should also check out Google’s official elections page, YouTube’s collection of candidate videos, and the elections Trends Dashboard to find out more about how people are interacting with the elections online.

More Powerful +1s on Google News

Unknown — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Posted by Erich Schmidt, Software Engineer Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying -- until now. Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles. Here’s what Spotlight looks like with social annotations:

We hope this change helps you find more great articles to enjoy, and gives more power to your +1s.

Highlighting journalists on Google News

Unknown — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:36:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer Great journalism takes more than facts and figures -- it takes skilled reporters to knit together compelling stories. Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article's context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them. Whole communities can form around prominent contributors, which is why we started showing information about content creators next to their material in Google Search. Accordingly, Google News is rolling out more information about journalists over the next several weeks, starting with English-language editions. When reporters link their Google profile with their articles, Google News now shows the writer’s name and how many Google+ users have that person in their circles. For the lead article for each story, Google News also shows that reporter’s profile picture and enables readers to add them to their Google+ circles right from the Google News homepage.

If you are a journalist and would like to participate, please follow the instructions in our Help Center. If you are a reader, we hope you enjoy learning more about the faces behind the news.

More points of view on Google News

Unknown — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:28:00 +0000

By Jayakumar Hoskere, Software Engineer

When a big story breaks, there are often over a thousand articles written about the news event. At Google News, we work hard to surface the most relevant and interesting content to you -- so you can spend less time sorting through thousands of articles, and more time consuming news from a range of diverse perspectives. For instance, since introducing expandable stories, we have added additional labels to call out special types of articles in many editions. These labels are designed to highlight different content types on Google News, and show you stories that complement and expand upon standard news reporting. The four labels we recently launched include:

Live Updating: A live-updating article, such as a liveblog.
Featured: An article a publisher has told us is standout.
Fact-check: An article providing fact-check content about the story.
Your Preferred source: An article from a source that you preferred.

Evaluating a story from different angles often provides a sharper perspective. That is why we also now highlight special types of articles in many Google News search results. Your search results will not only show recent articles, but also those from diverse perspectives that relate to a given query.

We also recently added the Translate button to non-English international stories in expandable story boxes in the U.S edition, giving you the ability to read pieces from all over the world -- even if you don’t speak the language.

We hope you find these changes useful as we continue to develop opportunities for you to find more interesting and valuable content.

News joins Google Dashboard

Unknown — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:48:00 +0000

Posted by Panchapagesan Krishnamurthy, Software Engineer

Halloween is almost here and we're celebrating early. No trick -- just a treat. As of now, you can access Google News in the Google Dashboard. This gives you the ability to see basic information about your Google News personalizations, check out our privacy policy and click through to edit your preferences.

We're excited to bring you this additional level of control and encourage you to give it a whirl.

Bringing relevant news to you, regardless of language

Google News Blog — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:58:00 +0000

Posted by Yaroslav Kurovtsev, Software Engineer, Google Translate

To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News. Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using Google Translate. Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin. To do this, we look for foreign articles from local sources on a relevant news topic. For example, in the case of the flood in Thailand, in addition to surfacing English articles from international press like New York Times, we might show a related article from a local source like อาร์วายที9.

At the same time, we hope readers will benefit from finding relevant news in other languages and being able to read it without knowing the language.

Google News launches redesign in UK and India

Unknown — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:34:00 +0000

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Starting today, we’ll be rolling out changes to some international versions of Google News in an effort to unify the News experience across editions. As in the U.S. version, these changes offer richer visual navigation, help you find trending and popular news more easily, give you the option to further customize your news experience, and allow you to share pieces you care about in a simpler way.

We’ve also been working to give you a closer relationship with the publishers you love, who can now highlight some of their most compelling content right on your Google News homepage.

In order to bring you the best Google News experience possible, we’ll be periodically refreshing select editions, starting with the U.K. and India. We hope you enjoy these enhancements. As always, please feel free to submit your feedback or visit our Help Center if you have more questions.

Recognizing publishers’ standout content in Google News

Unknown — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:31:00 +0000

Posted by David Smydra, Product Specialist and Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager

Every day, news organizations and journalists around the world dedicate significant time and resources toward some of the most critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out. Today, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, we introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this “standout” content and give even more credit where credit is due.

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

You can use the tag to point to your own content or to point to other sources with standout stories. Because the Standout tag belongs in the HTML header of your articles, it will only be seen by automated systems like Google News, not by direct readers of your articles themselves.

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

To be clear, Standout tags are just one signal among the many signals that algorithmically determine prominence on Google News. We recognize the importance of giving credit where credit is due, and believe this tag can be a step in the right direction -- but it will only succeed if the publisher community helps it succeed. We have experimented in the past with other metatags, and have applied feedback from those efforts to this initiative. As we monitor how the Standout tag is applied, we'll look forward to sharing further observations or updates.

To learn more about how the Standout tag works and how you can implement it on your site, visit our Help Center article.

Google News now crawling with Googlebot

Google News Blog — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Posted by David Smydra, Google News Product Specialist

(Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers. Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former user-agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot.

Our Help Center provides detailed guidance on using the robots exclusion protocol for Google News, and publishers can contact the Google News Support Team if they have any questions, but we wanted to first clarify the following:

Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies. (You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.)
Your analytics tool will still be able to differentiate user traffic coming to your website from Google Search and traffic coming from Google News, so you should see no changes there. The main difference is that you will no longer see occasional automated visits to your site from the Googlebot-news crawler.
If you’re currently respecting webmaster guidelines for Googlebot, you will not need to make any code changes to your site. Sites that have implemented subscriptions using a metered model or who have implemented First Click Free will not experience any changes. For sites which require registration, payment or login prior to reading any full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that you show all users who visit your page. Our Webmaster Guidelines provide additional information about “cloaking” (i.e., showing a bot a different version than what users experience). Learn more about Google News and subscription publishers in this Help Center article.
Rest assured, your Sitemap will still be crawled. This change does not affect how we crawl News Sitemaps. If you are a News publisher who hasn’t yet set up a News Sitemap and are interested in getting started, please follow this link.
For any publishers that wish to opt out of Google News and stay in Google Search, you can simply disallow Googlebot-news and allow Googlebot. For more information on how to do this, consult our Help Center.

As with any website, from time to time we need to make updates to our infrastructure. At the same time, we want to continue to provide as much control as possible to news web sites. We hope we have answered any questions you might have about this update. If you have additional questions, please check out our Help Center.

Enhancements to Google News for Android tablets and iPads

Google News Blog — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead, Mobile Google News

Alongside working on improving the Google News design for smartphones, we have also been looking into enhancing our offering for tablet devices. Today, we are launching a few minor enhancements to Google News for Android tablets and iPads.

We have optimized columns in the home page and section pages so that they can be more easily viewed in portrait and landscape orientations. Some of the other updates include: a conveniently placed menu on the top for navigating across sections, support of finger swiping through the multimedia strip in expanded story boxes and a more friendly edition picker.

These improvements are now available in the U.S. edition. To view these changes, just type news.google.com on the browser of your favorite tablet.

Google News highlights unique content with Editors’ Picks

Emily Wood — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:11:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

News organizations tell stories online in ways that bring together the best of traditional and digital journalism, whether that involves long-form investigative features, compelling photo slideshows or interactive maps and charts that add new levels of engagement to the day's news. To help connect you to the best works of news publishers, Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called "Editors' Picks,” and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to recent improvements we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News.

An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors' Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher's logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your news preferences. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors' Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.

You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks as an experiment last year. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they're interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites. We encourage any news organizations that are interested to visit our Help Center to get started.

Posted by Yogita Mehta, Software Engineer, Google News Team

A Few Google News Design Changes

Google News Blog — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:49:00 +0000

Posted by Jasson Schrock, User Experience Designer

Beginning today in the U.S. English edition of News, you may notice a few changes in the look and feel. This is part of a Google-wide initiative to improve your experience, and today we’re happy to extend this to Google News.

For starters, we’ve cleaned up the Google News homepage a bit. With fewer visual distractions and less clutter on the page, it should be faster to find the news important to you. The editions menu and “Personalize” button at the top should be easier to see. The “Personalize” button links to your recently consolidated personalization settings including your preferences for topics and favorite sources. Throughout the site, all the features and functionality are still there, but this updated design is aligned with the new consistent look across other recently updated Google sites like Gmail, Maps and Search.

Before

After

In the coming months, you’ll continue to see more improvements to the layout and design of the site, and we’ll also expand internationally.

Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics

Google News Blog — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Posted by Natasha Mohanty, Engineer, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand?

Starting today, in the U.S. edition of Google News, you can see how voracious a news reader you are by earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.

We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you. Here’s a taste:

Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are. You can also add custom sections by hovering on a badge and clicking “add section” to read more about your favorite topics. To get started with badges, visit Google News from a signed-in account with web history enabled and then visit this page on our Help Center for instructions.

This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges. Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.

In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the “News for you” and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.

We hope you’ll badge up on Google News to keep track of what you’re reading, read more of what you love and share your passions with your friends.

Applauding the 2011 Knight News Challenge winners

Google News Blog — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:49:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog)

Over the past few months, we’ve announced $5 million in grants to be distributed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the International Press Institute—two non-profit organizations developing new approaches to journalism in the digital age—and we’re pleased to congratulate the first initiatives that have been selected as part of that funding.

Today at M.I.T., the Knight Foundation showcased 16 projects selected as the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge. Now in its fifth year, this media-innovation contest included $1 million in support from Google. As you’ll see in the full list of winners, these initiatives come from organizations large and small and are reminders that entrepreneurship can be sparked anywhere. Here are just a few examples of the creative ways the journalism community around the world is merging traditional skills with an online landscape:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, OpenBlock Rural will use its seed money to work with local governments and community newspapers across the state to collect, aggregate and publish data.

In Virginia, the Miller Center Foundation’s State Decoded will serve as a platform to display state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen.

The Chicago Tribune will collaborate with the Investigative Editors & Reporters organization and The Spokesman-Review on a set of open-source, web-based tools that make it easier for journalists to use and analyze data.

Liverpool, U.K.-based ScraperWiki will bring its experiences with public data to journalism camps in 12 U.S. states.

Chile’s El Mostrador will develop an editorial and crowdsourced database to bring greater transparency to potential conflicts of interest.

Ushahidi will build off its past crisis efforts to improve information-verification across email, Twitter, web feeds and text messages.

Other winning proposals tell rich multimedia stories, bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media and further improve the utility of data to journalists. Our sister program in partnership with the International Press Institute is also well underway. The entries in that competition are now in and the winners will be announced later this summer. We look forward to seeing the impacts these initiatives have on digital journalism and hope they encourage continued experimentation and innovation at the grassroots level.

Posted by Jim Gerber, Director, Strategic Partnerships, News

Rededicating the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial

Google News Blog — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Sean Carlson, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Outside 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the front pages of newspapers from all 50 U.S. states mark the entrance to the Newseum. Inside the lobby, a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs confronts visitors with moments of triumph and tragedy captured on camera. The museum’s corridors display exhibit after exhibit highlighting the role of journalism and journalists throughout history.

One of the Newseum’s most moving tributes is its Journalists Memorial, a wall of glass paneling imprinted with the names of more than 2,000 people around the world who have died while reporting the news. Nearby kiosks narrate their stories, an online database enables anybody with Internet access to learn more, and our new YouTube channel further remembers these fallen journalists through video.

Earlier this week, Krishna Bharat, founder and head of Google News, spoke at the memorial’s annual rededication ceremony. As you can watch in the video below, he began by reflecting on what motivated those being honored “to walk a path that was not paved with gold, but with danger.”

Over the course of his address, Krishna discussed the importance of a free press to society and of high-quality content to the web, observed the rising number of online journalists and bloggers coming under attack, and recounted incidents reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists. On a personal level, he also shared his memories as a boy in India and the influence of his grandfather in inspiring his appreciation for news.

“The journalists we remember and honor today chose lives that were full of meaning and purpose,” he concluded. “Let their stories not be forgotten. Let us repeat them. Let us re-tweet them. And let us print them on our pages so the world knows that silencing a journalist simply does not pay.”

To their families, friends, and colleagues, we extend our sympathy and respect.

Expanding Google News for more variety and multimedia

Google News Blog — Mon, 16 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Chase Hensel, Associate Product Manager, Google News

Every day, Google News crawls through thousands of news articles to present you with the most relevant and recent stories. For a long time, we’ve realized that bringing relevant news to the surface is only part of the puzzle—it should also be easy to scan for stories of interest and dig deeper when you find them.

The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter.

Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don’t use and have a more streamlined experience:

Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.

We hope you like these changes—please share your feedback and visit our Help Center to learn more.

Introducing “News near you” on Google News for mobile

Google News Blog — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:15:00 +0000

Posted by Navneet Singh, Product Manager - Google News

Google News for mobile lets you keep up with the latest news, wherever you are. Today we’re excited to announce a new feature in the U.S. English edition called “News near you” that surfaces news relevant to the city you’re in and surrounding areas.

Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

Now you can find local news on your smartphone. Here’s an example of a “News near you” mobile section automatically created for someone in Topeka, Kansas:

To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.

You can turn off the feature at any time either by hiding the section in your personalization settings or by adjusting your mobile browser settings. Please visit the Help Center for further details.

So, go to news.google.com from your smartphone and get the latest news from wherever you are.

Google News and the Coverage of Bin Laden

Google News Blog — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Founder and Head - Google News

Google News was born in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. An unprecedented act of terrorism on U.S. soil, by a foreign militant group led by Osama Bin Laden, changed the course of history. People around the world were trying to comprehend what had just happened, and its implications to public safety, foreign policy, financial markets, and their own lives. Much of that exploration happened online.

At Google we realized that our ability to display links to the freshest and most relevant news was limited by a fundamental problem: fresh news lacked hyperlinks. Google’s ranking depended on links from other authors on the web. Fresh news, by definition, was too fresh to accumulate such links. A new importance signal was needed.

I realized that if Google could compute how many news sources were covering the underlying story at a given point in time, we could then estimate how important the story was. Thus, “Storyrank” was invented. This insight led to a ranking that combined the editorial wisdom of many editors on the web in real time. In addition to making search better it led to Google News - a display of stories in the news ranked automatically by an algorithm. This also allowed us to group news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place.

After 10 years Mr. Bin Laden is in the news again. The story of the killing of Bin Laden has taken the online world by storm. This time, relevant coverage from around the world is just a click away, in an automatically compiled Google News cluster with more than 80,000 sources.

We have certainly come a long way in the last decade. Indeed, Google News now has over 70 editions in over 30 languages, and sends over 1 billion clicks a month to news publishers worldwide. Additionally, 1 out of 6 web searches on Google includes a set of news results, which are computed with the help of Storyrank. This helps bring coverage of the most important news story matching the query to the top of the ranking.

In the last 10 years there has been a lot of learning, iteration, and innovation in our team. And most importantly, we have acquired a loyal audience of news enthusiasts, who appreciate diversity and the ability to access multiple points of view on a story. To our users we would like to say “Thank You!”

We wanted to share with you some of the news coverage of the death of Bin Laden. Here is a sample of 100 links to news articles from representative sources worldwide:

ABC News - Abril - Agenzia Giornalistica Italia - ANSA.it - Associated Press - Atlanta Journal Constitution - Baltimore Sun - BBC News - Billboard - Bloomberg - Boston Globe - Boston Herald - BusinessWeek - CBC.ca - CBS News - CBSSports - Chicago Sun-Times - Chicago Tribune - Christian Science Monitor - CNET - CNN - Computerworld - Corriere della Sera - Dallas Morning News - derStandard.at - Detroit Free Press - E! Online - El Pais (Colombia) - El País (España) - El Universal (Venezuela) - ESPN - Forbes - Fox News - Globe and Mail - Ha'aretz - Hindustan Times - Huffington Post - InformationWeek - Jerusalem Post - Jewish Telegraphic Agency - Kansas City Star - La Repubblica - La Stampa - Le Point - Los Angeles Times - MarketWatch - MLB.com - MSNBC - MTV - National Geographic - National Post - NDTV - New York Daily News - New York Times - New Yorker - Newsday - Newsweek - NFL News - NPR - NZZ Online - O Globo - PC Magazine - PCWorld - People Magazine - Philadelphia Inquirer - Politico - Reuters - RollingStone - Salt Lake Tribune - San Francisco Chronicle - San Jose Mercury News - Seattle Post Intelligencer - SI.com - Slate Magazine - Spiegel Online - Sydney Morning Herald - Telegraph.co.uk - The Atlantic - The Economist - The Guardian - The Hindu - TIME - Times of India - Toronto Sun - U.S. News & World Report - Us Magazine - USA Today - Vancouver Sun - Vanity Fair - Voice of America - Wall Street Journal - Washington Post - WELT ONLINE - Wired News - Yahoo! Sports - ZDNet - العربية ن - الجزيرة - 朝日新聞 - 読売新聞

For those you who enjoy digging into data, here is a much larger list of over 150,000 links to news articles mentioning Osama Bin Laden over the last 5 days (May 1-5, 2011).

One of the many lessons I learned from 9/11 is that the world is highly connected. We live in a global society crisscrossed by virtual and physical dependencies, where knowledge is power and ignorance has consequences. This is a world where knowing what is happening to people in other parts of world, and understanding their circumstances and beliefs, matters more than ever -- because their actions will ultimately affect our lives. Tools such as Google News, which bring order to information and make search smarter can help us cope with the complexity of news and understand the big picture.

Further, as the wave of revolutions in North Africa demonstrates, online information does not merely reflect world events -- it can even cause them. These are indeed exciting times for those of us who work in the news space and get to witness the impact of journalism on society first hand!

Automatic Personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News

Google News Blog — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Posted by Lucian Cionca, Software Engineer

Last summer we redesigned Google News with new personalization features that let you tell us which subjects and sources you’d like to see more or less often. Starting today -- if you’re logged in -- you may also find stories based on articles you’ve clicked on before.

For signed-in users in the Personalized U.S. Edition, “News for You” will now include stories based on your news-related web history. For example, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we'll make sure that you get a chance to see breaking baseball stories. We found in testing that more users clicked on more stories when we added this automatic personalization, sending more traffic to publishers.

Also for signed-in users, we’ve introduced “Recommended Sections” in the side column that suggests topics you can add to your news page as custom sections, based on stories you’ve clicked on before.

If you don’t want to see personalized news based on your Web History, you have a few options:

Click on the “Standard U.S. Edition” link at the bottom of Google News. This will not delete any of your News settings or Web History. It will switch you to an unpersonalized version of Google News for the duration of your current session. (To switch back, click on “Personalized U.S. Edition”.)
Delete your web history. (Google News may take some time to update.)
Log out of your Google Account.

To learn more, please visit our Help Center. And of course we'd love your feedback.

Update 6/6/2011:
We've extended the scope of automatic personalization to include Google News's "Local" and "Spotlight" sections. Since Spotlight has always been about serendipity, we are personalizing it with a light touch. As ever, if you'd prefer to see an unpersonalized edition, you can still switch to "Standard U.S. Edition," log out, or remove your web history.

Beyond Telegrams: Congratulations, Pulitzer Prize winners

Google News Blog — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 22:09:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Hirsch, Google News Support Team

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced an impressive list of 13 prize winners and 29 finalists for excellent work in journalism and storytelling. These winners represent a wide array of incredible stories, such as The Los Angeles Times's multi-part series about government corruption in the small town of Bell, California, or The New Jersey Star Ledger's gripping tale of a mysterious boat wreck. We on the Google News team have nothing but respect and admiration for their fine work. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists.

The winners also reflect the rapidly changing and evolving world of journalism itself. Almost all the awards went to stories accompanied by a rich presentation of content beyond just the printed words. ProPublica's series "The Wall Street Money Machine" includes detailed timelines and succinct data visualization to better illustrate the troublesome financial practices that led to the economic meltdown. To tell the story of one family's struggle to find a cure for their son's rare medical condition, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel produced numerous videos and an interactive graphics detailing the mysterious disease's physiology.

This year, prize rules explicitly encouraged the use of visual information, multimedia or databases. In fact, for the first time in the Prize’s history, jurors were mandated to bring laptops to the judging.

This isn't the first rule update in the prizes' 95 years of history. For instance, nobody has won the Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting since 1947. One recipient of the short-lived award was James Reston of The New York Times for his reporting from the 1945 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, a meeting between Allied Forces that laid the initial groundwork for the UN. Much of his reporting came from the acquisition of leaked cables from unsuspecting diplomats. Though reporting technology certainly has changed, this incident doesn’t sound so antiquated these days.

You can read one part of Reston's series here in Google News Archives as it appeared in The Montreal Gazette.

In expanding the short-lived category of Telegraphic Reporting to National Reporting and International Reporting, the Pulitzer Board must have suspected that technology for communicating over long distances would inevitably evolve. This year's prizes better reflect our current media environment, but it makes me wonder what the best in journalism will look like fifty years from now.

[Reporting from the age of the telegram c. 1940, from Life Photo Archive]

To search for the recent work of this year's Pulitizer Prize winner, you can use the Advanced News Search feature. Enter the name of the journalist whose work you're looking for in the "Author" field of our Advanced News Search page, or use the [author:] search operator in the News search bar. For an example of an [author:] search and to see the recent work of this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished criticism, click here.

New Google News for Opera Mini

Google News Blog — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:53:00 +0000

Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead and Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we’ve also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser.

So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone.

We hope that this will improve the news browsing experience for Opera Mini users around the world, including millions of people using a feature phone as the primary point of access for the web. See it here in the Indian Hindi and Nigerian English versions.

So, pick up your feature phone and point your Opera Mini browser to http://news.google.com to catch up on news anytime and anywhere. For more information or to share your feedback with us, please visit our Help Center.

A simple way for publishers to manage access to digital content

A Googler — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Posted by Lee Shirani, director, business product management, Google Commerce

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

At Humboldt University in Berlin today, Eric Schmidt announced Google One Pass, a service that lets publishers set their own prices and terms for their digital content. With Google One Pass, publishers can maintain direct relationships with their customers and give readers access to digital content across websites and mobile apps.

Readers who purchase from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smartphones and websites using a single sign-on with an email and password. Importantly, the service helps publishers authenticate existing subscribers so that readers don’t have to re-subscribe in order to access their content on new devices.

With Google One Pass, publishers can customize how and when they charge for content while experimenting with different models to see what works best for them—offering subscriptions, metered access, "freemium" content or even single articles for sale from their websites or mobile apps. The service also lets publishers give existing print subscribers free (or discounted) access to digital content. We take care of the rest, including payments technology handled via Google Checkout.

Our goal is to provide an open and flexible platform that furthers our commitment to support publishers, journalism and access to quality content. Like First Click Free, Fast Flip and Living Stories, this is another initiative developed to enable publishers to promote and distribute digital content.

German publishers Axel Springer AG, Focus Online (Tomorrow Focus) and Stern.de joined Eric at Humboldt University today as some of our first Google One Pass partners. Other publishers already signed up include Media General, NouvelObs, Bonnier’s Popular Science, Prisa and Rust Communications.

Google One Pass is currently available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. If you’re a publisher in one of these countries and want to learn more, please reach out to the Google One Pass team or submit your information on our website. For interested publishers in other countries, we’d love to hear from you too as we plan to expand to other countries in the coming months.

Credit where credit is due

Google News Blog — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer, and Abe Epton, Publisher Technical Specialist

News publishers and readers both benefit when journalists get proper credit for their work. That can be difficult, with news spreading so quickly and many websites syndicating articles to others. That’s why we’re experimenting with two new metatags for Google News: syndication-source and original-source. Each of these metatags addresses a different scenario, but for both the aim is to allow publishers to take credit for their work and give credit to other journalists. Here’s how to use these metatags:

syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we're asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:

original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:

In both cases, it's perfectly valid for a metatag to point to the current page URL. It's also fine for there to be multiple original-source metatags on one page, to indicate a variety of original reporting leading up to the current article. If you’re not sure of the exact URL to provide in either case, just use the domain of the site that should be credited.

Although these metatags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away. We'll need some time to observe their use "in the wild" before we can make the best use of them. But we're hopeful that this approach will help determine original authorship, and we encourage you to take advantage of them now.

To learn more about how these metatags work, and how you can implement them for your site, visit our Help Center article.

Update 2/11/11:

We've had a lot of interest in these meta tags, particularly in how the syndication-source tag relates to rel=canonical. After evaluating this feedback, we’ve updated our system to use rel=canonical instead of syndication-source, if both are specified.

If you know the full URL, rel=canonical is preferred, and you need not specify syndication-source.

If you know a partial URL, or just the domain name, continue using syndication-source.

We've also had people ask "why metatag instead of linktag"? We actually support both forms for the tag, and you can use either. However, we believe the linktag form is more in line with the spirit of the standard, and encourage new users to implement the linktag form rather than the metatag form we originally proposed.

Credit where credit is due

Google News Blog — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we're asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:

original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:

Enhancements to Google News for smartphones

Google News Blog — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:45:00 +0000

Posted by Arun Prasath, Tech Lead, Google Mobile News

Last November, we redesigned Google News for mobile access on smartphones including Android, iPhone and Palm Pre. Today, we're globally rolling out new usability and visual enhancements that we hope will make browsing news on your smartphone easier.

We expanded the story space to make tapping on articles easier and more accurate. Tapping anywhere on an article headline or snippet opens it up, and clicking on a section heading opens up that topic section on your screen.

In addition, the default view of stories is now collapsed which reduces scrolling time. You can 'expand' a story by tapping on 'More sources', which brings you to related stories from other sources. The screenshots below show the collapsed and expanded view of a story.

Collapsed:

Expanded:

So, pick up your smartphone, point your browser to http://news.google.com, and catch up on news on the go.

Enhancements to Google News for smartphones

Google News Blog — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:45:00 +0000

$5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism

Google News Blog — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Posted by Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development

Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organizations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we’re eager to play our part on the technology side -- experimenting with new ways of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and YouTube Direct to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.

But while we're mostly focused on working with news organizations to develop better products for users, we also believe it's crucial to encourage innovation at the grassroots level. That's why we’re giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations that are working to develop new approaches to journalism in the digital age. Our aim is to benefit news publishers of all sizes.

We've granted $2 million to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has a proven track record of supporting programs that drive innovation in journalism. It will use $1 million to support U.S. grant-making in this crucial area. The other $1 million will augment the Knight News Challenge, which is accepting funding proposals from anyone, anywhere in the world, until Dec. 1. Now in its fifth year, the News Challenge has supported projects like DocumentCloud, which aims to bring more investigative-reporting source material online so anyone can find and read it.

We’re eager to do even more internationally, so we will be investing the remaining $3 million in journalism projects in other countries through a similar partnership. Stay tuned for more details early next year.

We hope these grants will help new ideas blossom and encourage experimentation. As Thomas Edison once said, "When there's no experimenting, there's no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward." We look forward to working with the journalism community to help digital news move forward.

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Shining a Spotlight on Video News

Google News Blog — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Posted by Natasha Mohanty, Google News Software Engineer

Today in the U.S. we’re launching a new section in Google News called "Spotlight Video" that showcases popular videos from news channels on YouTube like "NOVA: The Secret Life of Scientists: Jean Berko Gleason" from PBS.

Google News has always helped users find recent articles from a wide variety of sources. But we recognize there are other types of stories that our users are interested in. So last year, we created the Spotlight section to feature stories of more lasting interest. Like the rest of Google News, Spotlight articles are selected by our computer algorithms, but they aren't your typical breaking news. Instead you'll find stories of enduring appeal such as feature articles, investigative reporting and opinion pieces. In fact, Spotlight quickly became one of our most popular sections.

So now we’re shining the spotlight on videos too. In the right-hand column you can find the new Spotlight Video section and check out recently popular news clips, like "Singer-producer Bruno Mars Continues to Rise" from the Associated Press.

If your news organization isn't already making its video content available on YouTube and Google News, we encourage you to get started. More information on how to submit your news videos to Google News can also be found in the News Publishers' Help Center. And here are some additional tips on news search engine optimization.

Side note: today you may have noticed we also modified the left-hand navigation. Now, as you scroll down the page, the navigation menu will move with you. This way, you can always see the sectional and hot topic quick links.

Please tell us what you think and we’ll keep working to improve Google News for you.

Shining a Spotlight on Video News

Google News Blog — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Google News turns eight

A Googler — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:02:00 +0000

Posted by Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head, and Chris Beckmann, product manager, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and political perspectives. On September 22, 2002, Google News rolled out to all English-language readers, with a dedicated News tab on Google.com.

Over the years we’ve made thousands of changes to deliver more news to more users—faster, and with enhanced customization, sharing and serendipity. We’ve added video, local news, custom sections, scanned newspaper archives and a redesigned homepage. We’ve grown from 4,000 sources to more than 50,000, and from one English edition to 72 editions in 30 languages.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our loyal users and the news publishers working hard to keep you informed. Thousands of stories are made more discoverable through Google News each day. Based on the number of articles indexed by Google News, here are the largest news stories from each of the last eight years:

The 2008 election of President Obama takes the cake as the biggest news story since Google News was born.

This year, as we blow out our candles we’ll make one wish: that we serve you—our users and publishing partners—better than ever before in the years to come.

Google News turns eight

A Googler — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:02:00 +0000

Posted by Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head, and Chris Beckmann, product manager, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Extending the Associated Press as Hosted News partner

Google News Blog — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We’ve extended our existing licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. We look forward to future collaborations, including on ways Google and AP can work together to create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities. You can read more about our hosted news agreements in this post and this one.

Extending the Associated Press as Hosted News partner

Google News Blog — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Google News changes reflect your feedback

Google News Blog — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:02:00 +0000

Posted by Chris Beckmann, Product Manager

Two weeks ago we gave the Google News homepage a new look and feel with enhanced customization, discovery and sharing. This redesign was our biggest since Google News launched in beta in 2002.

Some of you told us that you really liked it, especially how the "News for you" section lets you see a stream of articles tailored to the interests you specify. The positive usage data we saw during our months-long tests of the redesign has continued since we introduced it to all users of the U.S. English edition, and hundreds of thousands of you have already customized your Google News homepages. But some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns.

At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating, so we've been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback. For example, we're now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story, rather than expanding the cluster when you hover your mouse over it. We've given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in "News for you": Two-column view, which shows the three top stories from each section and looks like this:

A key goal of the redesign was to give you more ways to personalize your Google News, and these changes add even more choices. A heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts with us. Please keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make Google News even better.

Google News changes reflect your feedback

Google News Blog — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:02:00 +0000

The Magic of a Game 7

Google News Blog — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:25:00 +0000

Posted by David Smydra, Google News Online Team

Growing up a diehard Pistons fan in Detroit, Michigan, I was taught two things about the sport of basketball. First, always cheer against the Boston Celtics. Second, always cheer against the Los Angeles Lakers. Fortunately, this was an easy thing for me to do: the Pistons beat both teams en route to its first NBA championship in 1989.

Tonight, however, the Lakers and Celtics complete their twelfth championship match-up in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals. This will be just the fifth time that a Lakers-Celtics Finals has reached seven games. And of course I know this by browsing through Google News Archive Search.

I can read about how Celtics coach Red Auerbach was "feeling a bit cocky" in the 1962 NBA Finals. Or about how the Celtics became the first major professional sports team to win eight consecutive championships by dispatching the Lakers in 1966. Or how Wilt Chamberlain wanted to beat Bill Russell's Celtics "in the worst way" in 1969. (He didn’t; the Celtics won again.) Or about how Lakers coach Pat Riley wanted to make history in the 1984 NBA Finals by beating the Celtics in Game 7, on the road, in the old Boston Garden. (Yet again, the Lakers lost.)

While the Celtics have history on their side, this year’s Lakers can boast a better overall record and are the defending champions, having won the 2009 Finals. Then again, they lost in the 2008 NBA Finals to...the Boston Celtics.

So it should be a great game, and well worth following. For that, be sure to check Google News.

As for my prediction, what can I say? I’m still recovering from the fact that the Pistons had their worst record in sixteen years and didn’t even make the playoffs. I guess it’s impossible for both teams to lose, huh?

Krishna Bharat discusses the past and future of Google News

Google News Blog — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:07:00 +0000

Posted by Chris Gaither, Senior Manager, News Industry Relations

Krishna Bharat invented Google News more than eight years ago. His aim: help people easily find multiple perspectives on the news of the day by using computers to group together links to similar stories. Aside from a two-year stint in India to start our research and development operations there, Krishna has been working to improve Google News ever since.

Krishna visited the IJ-7 “innovation journalism” conference at Stanford University last week and held an on-stage conversation with David Nordfors, executive director of Stanford’s Center for Innovation and Communication. Below you can watch video of the conversation and hear from Krishna about why he created Google News, how it works, where it’s headed and why he’s optimistic about the future of professional journalism.

Making your video news more discoverable: best practices for news publishers

Google News Blog — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:20:00 +0000

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist Google News, and Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager

Video has always been a unique storytelling tool, especially useful when reporting the news. From raw, citizen-reported videos from the streets of Tehran, to student documentaries highlighting under-reported issues in local communities, or investigative reporting done by professional news outlets, just about every type of news video can now be found on YouTube. Video is also tightly integrated into the Google News experience, providing users different ways to consume and enjoy news, while giving news publishers the opportunity to reach a greater and more diverse audience.

We are working to make it easier to get your video content indexed in Google News, but ensuring it’s found in a timely fashion is another matter. So we thought we’d share six best practices for how news publishers can increase the discoverability of their news videos.

1. Timely uploads
Videos should be uploaded as quickly as possible -- this will help them reach the news homepage faster and be grouped with the most recent articles.

2. One story per video
Instead of having one video that contains multiple segments covering several different stories of the day, it's a better user experience (and easier for us to index), when there is one story per video, and the video title is specific (not something generic like “Breaking News”). At the very least, the description of the video should match the first story in the video.

3. Categorization
If you are providing general news coverage, select YouTube category “News & Politics” (which is youtube_category_id 25) when uploading your video. If you have multiple channels, clearly identify each category (politics, business, entertainment, sports, etc.).

4. More detailed descriptions
Similar to the first paragraph of a news article, descriptions of the news video should convey the who, what, when, where, and why of the story in a few sentences -- the more detail you can supply, the better.

5. Rich tags
Another way to convey the content of the video is using the keyword tags. Providing keywords that might not be in the description gives us more knowledge of what the video is about. Especially helpful are proper nouns: the names of the people, places, companies, etc. mentioned in the video.

6. Make it Embeddable
Be sure your video is embeddable on other sites since this is currently a technical requirement for being displayed in Google News. Additionally, if your videos are geo-blocked in certain regions, they will not appear in Google News.

If your news organization isn’t already making its video content available on YouTube and Google News, we encourage you to get started. More information on how to submit your news videos to Google News can also be found in the News Publishers Help Center, and you can watch this video for additional tips on news search engine optimization.

Bringing Living Stories to WordPress

Google News Blog — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:58:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Zhang, Software Engineer

For the last few months we’ve been talking with publishers about ways to make it easier for them to use Living Stories, our experimental format for displaying news coverage, on their own websites. Today we’re releasing a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress. Now anyone who publishes through WordPress can use the plugin to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page.

We first showcased Living Stories in December through a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times and Washington Post. We got great feedback from both readers and publishers. Our next step was to open-source the Living Stories format, allowing publishers to build on it using Google’s AppEngine infrastructure. We then released a version of the code that runs independent of our infrastructure. Since then, a number of publications have shared their ideas for ways we can offer additional tools to help them create Living Stories.

The WordPress plugin is a direct result of those conversations. We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all. Head to our documentation page for detailed instructions. If you have questions or feedback, feel free to leave us a note in our help forum. We’re looking forward to reading your stories and seeing how the Living Stories format evolves on WordPress.

Two more weeks to update your Google News Sitemap

Google News Blog — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer

Almost five months ago, we announced a redesign for our Google News Sitemap. We wanted to give publishers plenty of advance notice so they could make a smooth transition to the new format.

This transition period will end on May 4, when we'll discontinue supporting all old-style Google News Sitemaps. If you are a publisher and haven't already shifted your Google News sitemap to the new format, we urge you to do so by following these instructions as soon as possible. This update is key to avoid interruption in crawling your content and allow our crawler to capture all necessary information about your articles.

If you've already made the changes to your sitemap, we thank you. There is no need to worry about this update. If you're interested in learning more about Google News sitemaps, we encourage you to read this section of our Help Center and submit a sitemap for your articles in Google News. You may also be interested in checking out our Help Forum where other publishers have shared useful tips and discussed other Sitemaps-related questions.

Don't forget to update your Google News Sitemaps. There are only two more weeks to go!

Eric Schmidt discusses innovation with news editors

Google News Blog — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 01:48:00 +0000

Posted by Chris Gaither, Senior Manager, Global Communications & Public Affairs

This week, hundreds of newsroom leaders from across the country are gathered in Washington DC for the American Society of News Editors’ annual conference. The theme of this year's event is "ideas," and Eric Schmidt shared many of his as the opening speaker. He spoke about some of the big trends that are shaping the Internet, such as the rise of mobile and cloud computing, and some lessons he has learned about how to navigate the Web’s constant pace of change.

He also talked about the importance of journalism to functioning democracies and encouraged the group to work together -- as well as with technology partners like Google -- to find new ways to reach and engage audiences, tell important stories and build thriving businesses online.

You can watch Eric's speech, which we've posted on YouTube, below. And if you’re interested in reading or contributing to the discussion about the future of news, check out the unofficial conference blog and #asne10 on Twitter.

Open-sourcing the Living Stories format

Google News Blog — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:04:00 +0000

Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the New York Times and Washington Post have been experimenting with Living Stories, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the Times enlighten readers on such subjects as global warming, the Afghanistan war, the N.F.L. playoffs and executive compensation. The Post has used it to report on health care reform, the Redskins' season and the overhaul of the D.C. school system.

Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.

In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're open-sourcing the code so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the open-source documentation for technical details; read our Google News Help Forum to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the Times and the Post are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.

In coming months, we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.

Starring stories in Google News

Google News Blog — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer, Google News

A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.

Today, we are giving users even more options for following stories. Users can mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it, like they can with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News.

We hope you enjoy the new feature and welcome your feedback.

Google News Comes Back For More

Google News Blog — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:53:00 +0000

Posted by Andy Golding and Kiran Gunda, Software Engineers

If you read news online, you've probably noticed that articles aren't static. They often change over time, to reflect things like typo fixes, shifts in emphasis, new information or corrections of previous mistakes. Sometimes they even switch URLs, or become unavailable after a certain period of time. As a human being, reading at most a few dozen articles a day, this is no big deal.

But if you happen to be, say, a news search engine that crawls hundreds of articles at thousands of sites every minute, this presents a unique set of challenges. How do you balance looking for new content against the need to update older content? How can you make sure the content is fresh, doesn't link to dead pages or display headlines that have been changed by the publisher?

To deal with these issues, Google News has implemented a recrawl feature that allows us to focus on getting the newest articles around while still ensuring that we're displaying the most up-to-date information. From the moment we discover a new article, we'll keep revisiting it looking for changes. Since we've noticed that most changes to articles occur just after they're published, we revisit articles most frequently in the first day after we've found them. In some cases, we'll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around. After that, we visit them less often. Either way, we try hard to present users with the freshest news. (We bet whoever wrote "Dewey Defeats Truman" wishes they had recrawl!)

For readers, this feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links you might find. And for publishers, rest assured that we'll be back to find your latest stories and updates as soon as we can.