News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Looking back in time for context
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer
News coverage usually focuses on the most recent events, and when we
first launched quotes
, we did the same. However, past events frequently provide context that helps us better understand the present. With this in mind, we recently extended our quotes coverage back to 2003. Hopefully this new data (our quotes index grew 15x in size!) will help shed light on what people have thought and said over time, and how their views have changed.
As always, to find a person's quotes you can search for their
name
on Google News, and if we have any quotes from that person, they'll appear in a onebox at the top of the page. Click on the 'more by' link and from there you can simply browse through all our quotes from that person, or filter them to a specific year using the links on the left. Try comparing Alan Greenspan's quotes on the economy from
2004
to those from
2008
:
People running for office are some of the most prolific speakers, especially on economic matters.
In Quotes
makes it easy to compare what
McCain and Obama
have said about the economy (or, try comparing
Palin and Biden
.)
Of course, quotes are not restricted to politics--there are also many from sports figures. See what Michael Phelps said about the
2004
and
2008
Olympic games, or what Roger Federer has been saying about
Wimbledon
.
Straight from the horse's mouth
Monday, October 13, 2008
Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager
With Google News, you can read what candidates are saying about a given topic. You can even
compare
what two of them are saying about the same topic. But it's also important to hear candidates deliver their own message themselves, in their own voice.
Today, we're adding another tool to the Google News suite to enable you to find and access political messages straight from the horse's mouth. Using the Google Audio Indexing (
GAudi
) technology already available on Labs, you can now search for and watch political videos right from the
Google News election page
.
Starting today, after reading an article about a topic that matters to you, you can quickly find out what the candidates have to say about it and hear them say it. Just enter the topic you're interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we'll search candidates' YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (
all candidates
,
McCain's campaign
,
Obama's campaign
or
the presidential debates
). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you're looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video. You can also share a given video with your friends (just click on
), in case they don't want to take your word for it. Keep in mind that speech-to-text technology is not perfect yet, and some transcriptions might contain some errors. But we think this tool will serve as a valuable resource as we count down to Election 2008.
Checking for political consistency (or inconsistency) has never been so simple. And as election day nears, keep checking our
election-related projects
.
Google News in Telugu
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Posted by Kiran Gunda, Software Engineer
During this festive season we are excited to welcome the newest member of the Google News family -
Google News in Telugu
. Like all Google News editions, the Telugu edition gathers news from several Telugu sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections.
We know that the 75 million strong Telugu speaking population wants to stay on top of current affairs and we hope this new edition makes it easier for them do so. The
Telugu
edition is our fifth Indian edition of Google News; we already have editions in
English
,
Hindi
,
Tamil
and
Malayalam
.
As we've blogged about in our previous
Indian language edition launches
, one of the biggest challenges we faced was making sense of the many non-standard font-encodings used by various publications. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of the text because they are not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well established standard for exchange of text today, we strongly encourage news websites to adopt the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard.
If you are a Telugu news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can
contact us
to request inclusion. In some cases, we were not able to include news sites because of technical reasons having to do with the structure of the URL or proprietary encodings. You can learn much more about making sure your content is surfaced correctly by reading our documentation on
Help for Publishers
.
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