News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Update on United Airlines story
Monday, September 8, 2008
Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager
Aggregators like Google News were today the subject of
news
– this time pertaining to a 2002 story regarding United Airlines. For those of you who are interested in the nuts and bolts of why this was indexed by Google News, here are the details:
On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36PM Pacific, the Google crawler discovered a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link appeared in that section sometime after Googlebot's last crawl at 10:17PM; because the crawler saw this new link appear, it followed it to an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."
The only date found in the context of the article indicated that the article was from September 7, 2008.
The article was indexed and then available through Google News search, but was not shown on our headlines pages.
We removed this story from the Google News index as soon as we were notified that it had been linked to in error.
It has been widely reported that many readers were unable to determine the original date of publication of this article, and our crawling was similarly unable to recognize that the article was old.
UPDATE 9/10/08
Since our last post, some have asked why Google News didn't recognize that an old story relating to United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy was outdated. We thought that a brief chronology would be helpful.
On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time (or Sunday, September 7th at 1:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time), the Google crawler detected a new link on the
Florida Sun-Sentinel's
website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled "Popular Stories: Business." The link had newly appeared in that section since the last time Google News' Googlebot webcrawler had visited the page (nineteen minutes earlier), so the crawler followed the link and found an article titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." The article failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline, but the
Sun-Sentinel
page had a fresh date above the article on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008" (Eastern).
Because the
Sun-Sentinel
included a link to the story in its "Popular Stories" section, and provided a date on the article page of September 7, 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story. We removed this story as soon as we were notified that it was posted in error.
While we don't know why the
Sun-Sentinel's
website included the link in its "Popular Stories" section, our timestamps show that Google News first crawled the UAL story after following the link from the Sun-Sentinel's "Popular Stories" box:
At 10:17:35 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved a copy of the
Sun-Sentinel
business section page.
As you can see, no UAL story appears at this time.
At 10:36:38 PM/PDT, our crawler retrieved an updated copy of the same section. This updated version included a new link in the "Popular Stories: Business" section to a story titled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy."
At 10:36:57 PM/PDT, our crawler followed the new link and fetched this copy of the UAL story.
At that point, our index was updated to include the article with the date that the story was crawled, and the story became searchable on Google News.
At 10:39:57 PM/PDT, the
Sun-Sentinel
received its first referral to the UAL story from Google News, with a user clicking on a Google News link to the
Sun-Sentinel's
UAL story.
The Tribune Co. (owner of the
Sun-Sentinel
) has confirmed in its September 9, 2008
press release
that the first referral from Google News to the article came after the UAL story appeared in the "Popular Stories" section.
We hope that this sheds some light on the situation from our perspective.
Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time
Monday, September 8, 2008
Posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager
Today, we announced that we're launching an effort to give Internet users everywhere more tools to discover, explore, and celebrate much more of our journalistic heritage by digitizing archival newspapers and making them available online in partnership with newspaper publishers across the world. Head on over to the Official Google Blog to
read more about this new initiative
.
Live coverage of the GOP Convention on Google News
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Posted by David Garnick, Product Manager
The Republican National Convention is underway in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Google News is taking you there. Well, maybe not literally there, but as close as we can get you! For the duration of the convention, you can watch live streaming of the activities on a player located on the special
Elections section of Google News
. (It's also embedded just below this sentence.)
Live Streaming by Ustream
We're working with Ustream.tv to stream the coverage live at the following times:
Tuesday, September 2: 6:20 - 10:05 p.m. CDT
Wednesday, September 3: 6:20 - 11:20 p.m. CDT
Thursday, September 4: 6:20 - 10:15 p.m. CDT
If you miss some of the speeches, highlights from the convention will be broadcast at other times all week long.
I'm excited that I can watch the convention, alongside ongoing news coverage, from the first balloon to the last confetti.
News without borders: search results across languages
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Posted by Mahesh KM, Software Engineer
One of our most important goals for Google News is to expose readers to a diverse range of journalistic viewpoints. This is why we think it's important to have hundreds, if not thousands of different sources for important stories. It's also why Google News is currently available in more than 20 languages.
We've recently released a feature which we call cross-language search, which will help you find even more perspectives when you search in Google News. Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.
You won't see results in different languages unless they're at least as good as those in your own language. This means it's more likely that you'll see results in other languages if you're using Google News in a country which doesn't have many online news sources. You'd also be more likely to see them if you're in a country in which more than one language is widely used, such as Canada or India. For a language which has lots of sources, like English, it's unlikely that you'll find a foreign-language result when you search normally on Google News -- especially if you're searching from within a monolingual country like the United States or the United Kingdom. However, if you were searching for a breaking story in another country, and sorting your results by date, you might see a foreign-language story from a local news source which has the latest coverage.
Similarly, if you type in a query in a foreign language, we'll know to display results from that language, no matter what version of Google News you're using. For example, if you use the Czech edition and want to see how the new Batman movie is being reviewed, we'll show you results from countries where it's already been released,
in English and Czech
. Or if you're reading the Spanish edition of Google News and want to learn more about the recent G8 summit,
we'll show you results in English as well as Spanish
, since 3 of the 8 countries in the G8 are Anglophone, and none are Spanish-speaking.
More African countries now have their own edition of Google News
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Posted by Divon Lan, Product Manager
Google News is a truly international project, spanning dozens of countries and over 20 languages. But that still leaves plenty of countries without their own dedicated edition of Google News.
Today, we are delighted to announce that we've made great progress in our quest to give Google News an even more global reach, by adding 9 more countries to our repertoire. If you head down to the bottom of any Google News page, you'll see new English editions in
Botswana
,
Ethiopia
,
Ghana
,
Kenya
,
Namibia
,
Nigeria
,
Tanzania
,
Uganda
and
Zimbabwe
.
With these 9 new editions, Google News now has a significant presence on every one of the world's inhabited continents: 5 editions in North America; 7 editions in South America and the Caribbean; 19 editions in Europe (including Turkey); 11 editions in Asia, the Middle East and Oceania; and now 10 editions in Africa.
Google brings News to its Turkish users
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Posted by Mustafa Icil, Country Marketing Manager, Turkey
Today, we're delighted to announce the launch of Google News in Turkey. Now, Turkish-speaking users in Turkey and around the world are a click away from the latest news in their native language. The Google News Turkish edition crawls articles from more than 400 sources, so that news enthusiasts in Turkey can easily discover and read a wide variety of perspectives on important stories.
We think this is a significant step towards helping our Turkish users find even more content online. We're pleased to note that with this launch, we've made over 40 regional editions of Google News available in 22 different languages.
If you're interested, you can try out the Turkish edition at
news.google.com.tr
or
haberler.google.com.tr
.
Google News goes to the Summer Games
Friday, August 8, 2008
Posted by Lara Rennie, Software Engineer, Trondheim
We have software engineers from almost every country in the world, so we know as well as anyone how passionate folks can get about their hometown athletes. This year, the Google News team is doing our part by launching a
Summer Games section
in different news editions so that Games enthusiasts around the world can follow the progress of athletes from New Zealand to Norway, in whatever language they prefer to read their news.
Our Summer Games section highlights the action by bringing together the top articles about the Games. This automated section, currently available in our most popular languages, combs through all the news we can find to show you the most up-to-date headlines from the 2008 Games. The section also includes two gadgets along the right side of the page: one to help you keep tabs on upcoming events and one that displays the all-important medal count.
So on the News team, we're ready for a little friendly international competition. Will the U.S. retain its 2004 distinction as the winner of the most medals? Or will China, with its home advantage, oust the States from this coveted position? One thing we know for sure: our News engineers in Norway will be cheering for Norwegian supremacy no matter what.
Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Posted by Vinodh Kumar, Kiran Gunda and Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers
வணக்கம். தமிழில் செய்திகள்! (Greetings, News In Tamil!)
It's not every day that you get to launch a product in a more than 2,000-year-old language spoken by more than 70 million people. That's why we're excited to tell you that Google News is
now available in Tamil
. Tamil is one of the most widely-spoken languages in India, which is no mean feat considering that there are 22 official languages here.
The Google News Tamil edition indexes news from a large number of Tamil sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google News sections, we have seperate local sections for Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, regions that are home to millions of Tamilians. One issue we faced during the launch of the
Tamil edition
was incorporating news sites that do not use
the Unicode based UTF-8 standard
. We faced
similar issues
when we launched our
Hindi edition
last year. Since then, we are pleased to note that several Hindi news sites have shifted to the Unicode standard (and we encourage all publishers to do the same, so that more people can read your online publication.)
We hope this edition will help Tamil readers reach their online news destinations faster and help Tamil news publishers to connect more easily to their readers.
Testing... testing... is this on?
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Posted by Frank Harris, Senior User Experience Designer
Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism. They'll only be visible to a small number of random Google News readers. (In case you're wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can't give you any advice for how to get in!)
It's pretty normal for us to run this kind of test, as we're always working to improve the experience of using Google News. In fact, experiments like these are a cornerstone of Google's development process -
here's a post on the Official Google Blog explaining this practice for our search results
.
Reflections on the Sichuan earthquake
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Posted by Xin Li, Engineering Manager
The devastating earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province at 2:28 pm on May 12. I was so worried: there was no news about what had happened shortly after the earthquake, and even worse, I was unable to reach my parents in my home town there. It was not until 2 hours later that my call to my parents finally got through, to find that, luckily, they were all safe. Despite my own good fortune, I could not help crying even in public for all the friends in my home town, whether known or unknown. The catastrophic impact was far more than the media could describe.
When the earthquake happened, we, as humans, felt ourselves to be so weak and helpless. However, as the rescue and recovery plans started, people found there was so much they wanted to do. The government, rescuers from around the world and indeed the whole nation have joined together to recover from this unpredictable disaster. Many of my
colleagues in Google China helped to start several initiatives
in response. The reaction to this misfortune has been overwhelmingly loving and positive. So far, the value of aid donated nationally and internationally has exceeded more than 6 billion USD.
As we, the Google News team in Shanghai, witnessed events, we had a strong desire to help keep people informed with in-depth coverage of the unfolding crisis. So we created a special section in the
China edition of Google News
to cover the earthquake. The section also contains a link near the top of the page which directs readers to a Checkout Donations page where they can make donations to people in need.
News carries the message, passes on stories of adversity and hope, and relieves the hardship. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we think that by spreading news about this tragedy, we can help connect people who care about it.
An aftershock of 5.3 magnitude struck Sichuan today, June 5, 2008. As of today, the China earthquake death toll has risen to over 69,100.
Our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow Sichuanese.
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