News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Suggest on Google News
Monday, August 31, 2009
Posted by
Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers
Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.
Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.
As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:
We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!
Looking Backward: Nominating a new Justice
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team
A few minutes ago, the United States Senate voted 68-31 in favor of confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the newest addition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor's confirmation followed three days of debate on the Senate floor, and was preceded by a series of lengthy and widely-reported confirmation hearings in July. A simple search for [
Sotomayor
] on Google News yields articles from thousands of sources covering this developing story.
Judge Sotomayor will soon become part of an elite group of Americans, as the 111th Justice to serve on the Court. The process by which new Justices are vetted and confirmed for this powerful body has long been a subject of intense media interest. As history was being made this week, I took a look back using News Archive Search's Timeline view for the term [
supreme court confirmation
]. While browsing the archives, common threads in media coverage of Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings jumped out at me. I've included some articles below from the last 75 years of Supreme Court History.
These materials were made browsable via our
News Archive Partner Program
. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.
Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:
Morning Star - Jul 23, 1993
St. Petersburg Times - Aug 13, 1937
The Deseret News. - Jul 5, 1987
Eugene Register-Guard - Mar 21, 1939
Pardon Our Dust: Temporary Issues with Webmaster Tools
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Posted by Abe Epton, Publisher Support Team
Google News publishers have long made use of
Webmaster Tools
to submit and update their News sitemaps, as well as learn more about how Google is crawling their site. Recently, the Webmaster Tools site underwent a
major makeover
designed to make it easier for publishers to use. As part of this process, Google News is working to improve our interaction with Webmaster Tools and help news publishers take advantage of some of WMT's helpful new features.
Unfortunately, this also means that there are currently a few issues that publishers are seeing. We wanted to let you know what they were, and reassure you that we're working on them. While there may be some sawdust and loose nails lying around at the moment, it won't be long before a sturdy new edifice has been completed, and we think publishers will agree that the hard work will have been worth it. For the moment, however:
Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" (
) even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.
From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.
We apologize for the inconvenience these issues may be causing you. We're working hard to improve the sitemap submission experience, and think you'll be pleased with the results.
Extra! Extra! Updates from our growing newspaper archives
Monday, August 3, 2009
Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team
Last September on this blog,
we announced
a new initiative to digitize newspapers and make them accessible and searchable online.
We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the
Halifax Gazette
,
Sydney Morning Herald
, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, and the
Village Voice
. Working with our partners, we've also added new international publications such as the
Manila Standard
,
The Nation
from Thailand, and many others.
Looking for a place to start exploring this rich historical index? How about the complete
June 2, 1753 edition
of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers we've digitized to date.
News Archive Search is an ongoing effort, and we're continuing to work with publishers to add new materials. You can explore this historical treasure trove by searching on
News Archive Search
or by using the timeline feature after searching on
Google News
.
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