News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Automatic Personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News
Thursday, April 21, 2011
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
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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
Thursday, April 14, 2011
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
.
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