News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Rededicating the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
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
Monday, May 16, 2011
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
Friday, May 13, 2011
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
Friday, May 6, 2011
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!
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