News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Get your news fix on your iGoogle page
Monday, October 29, 2007
Posted by Kevin Liu, Jin-Ho Kim, Jaeho Kang, Software Engineers
Lots of people love small, portable, sexy gadgets, and that's exactly what we've just created. We're not talking hardware, of course -- what we're introducing is the
iGoogle News gadget
.
The iGoogle News gadget shows your favorite Google News in a small-screen format, complete with news headlines, snippets, and thumbnails, grouped by news clusters. If you're really into a particular story, there are links to see the full text and related news in a cluster, or more stories in the same category.
It's easy to add the gadget to iGoogle so you can read daily news alongside your mail and other favorite feeds. It can also be displayed on partner sites, or even added on your own web pages using
iGoogle syndication technology
.
The iGoogle News gadget uses tabs to display different news sections separately in its own tabs, and you can customize the news sections you want to see. You can also create custom sections by entering query terms in the "edit settings tab" (the "+" tab). The gadget allows you to reorder tabs by dragging and dropping, just as you can do with gadgets on your iGoogle page.
You can also select the news editions you want to see and easily add multiple news gadgets to your iGoogle page. Customize each of them, and enjoy reading Google News from multiple countries at a glance. The new News gadget has been localized to 19 languages and supports 38 News editions (more coming). We've also added it to iGoogle as a default gadget on several domains.
Add it
to your existing iGoogle page.
We hope you enjoy this gadget, and as always, we welcome your
feedback
.
Google News goes social
Friday, October 19, 2007
Posted by Tina Huang and Dan Meredith, News Team Engineers
Whether it is from our
homepage
, one of our
RSS feeds
, or on a mobile device, Google News seeks to connect people with the news that matters to them -- wherever they may be. As part of that goal we are pleased to announce the
Google News Application for Facebook
. This experimental application enables users to create custom sections or select from a set of pre-defined topics, then browse and share stories with their friends on Facebook. We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience. Enjoy!
Catching the news as it breaks
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Posted by Abraham Epton, News Support Team
I recently moved about two thousand miles across the country, and aside from the lack of good pizza, one of the most disorienting things about having moved is not knowing what's going on back home. That's why I'd like to tell you about one of my favorite Google tools,
Google Alerts
, which makes staying current as simple as checking your email every morning.
I use Alerts to keep track of news about Chicago politics, but the beauty of Alerts is that you can use it to look for anything that appears in a
news story
,
blog post
,
Google Groups thread
or
anywhere else on the Internet
. Just go to
google.com/alerts
and enter the term or terms you're interested in, along with the sources you'd like to see results from, how often you want to receive the alerts and your email address. You can create up to 1,000 alerts per email address, and you can update your preferences at any time by following the links at the bottom of any Alerts email you receive.
However, you can use Alerts for much more than checking up on shenanigans in the 1st Ward. If you're in a media-sensitive environment, such as a political or public relations campaign, you can create alerts that let you know whenever you or your client appear in the headlines - as soon as the story breaks. You can be the first to know when something happens to your favorite baseball player, when a review appears for a new movie you'd like to see, or when a new
lolcats
site goes live.
But Alerts are also very useful for news publishers and webmasters who want to track the inclusion of their content in Google News. Using our search operators -- like the site: operator, which returns search results from a specific domain (i.e. searching for "site:nytimes.com" will return all articles from the New York Times) -- a news publisher can get a daily email listing a selection of articles from their site that made it into Google News. And of course, anyone can use Alerts to notify them when a new post goes live on their favorite news site, or when something happens involving one of their competitors.
With millions of pages being updated every day on the still-nascent Web, it can be difficult for mere mortals to stay up-to-date. Thankfully, with Alerts, you can rely on the world's largest search engine to help you out.
News sitemaps for publishers around the world
Friday, September 28, 2007
Posted by Benoit Lafortune, News Support Team
If you're a news publisher and want greater control over how your articles get included in Google News, we've got a great opportunity for you: Today we made Google News sitemaps available globally. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now directly submit your most recent articles via News sitemaps in all the languages we support. You can also specify keywords for each article to tell us more about them so we can better place them in the appropriate news section. You'll get error reports specific to Google News explaining any problems we experienced crawling or extracting articles from your site. And you'll receive additional information on the types of queries that lead Google News users to your site.
Why should I use News sitemaps?
So that you can tell us which articles you'd like us to crawl.
When should I submit my articles?
As early as possible. You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner we can crawl and extract them. The result is that you'll boost your publishing power, and we'll process your most recent articles more quickly, since we recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.
How do I submit a News sitemap?
Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn't included in Google News, you can
request inclusion
.
Sounds good. How do I check the status of my submitted News sitemap?
Once we've verified site ownership through your Webmaster Tools Account, you can view details about your site, including error reports, from the Dashboard by clicking on your site link in the Site column and then clicking the Sitemaps tab.
What if I don't use News Sitemaps?
We don't favor sites that use a News sitemap over those that don't. We still crawl all news sites quickly. However, a News sitemap is a great tool to give you greater control over how your content appears in Google News and to alert you to any errors we might encounter when we try to crawl your site.
What if I have more questions about News sitemaps?
Take advantage of all these benefits by submitting your articles today by visiting our
Help Center for Publishers
.
In case you can't tell, we're pretty excited about this new feature. We think News sitemaps can be a real help to publishers and we're glad we can make them available to more publishers. Let us know
what you think
-- we'd love to hear from you.
First click free
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Posted by Christina Cacioppo, News Support Team intern
As a college student, I use Google every day –
email
,
news
,
documents and spreadsheets
– you name the product, and I probably use it. This has made my summer internship with the Google News Support team even more illuminating. Though I thought I knew the ins and outs of many Google products (and there are
lots
of them), I'm actually only a beginner.
The News Support team interacts with users on a daily basis; we’re the go-to people for help and troubleshooting for our readers and publishers. We work hard to provide a comprehensive experience for Google News readers - from occasional surfers to news junkies. Whether we’re adding new sources or supporting new features (like
video
!), users are one of our primary concerns. Does a certain source have original articles that you will be interested in? Will you be able to access these articles?
One feature I’ve become more aware of is
First click free
. If you aren’t familiar, First click free is a way for publishers to share their subscription-only content with Google News readers. All articles that are accessed from Google News are allowed to skip over the subscription page.
In practice, this means that when you click on a link from Google News, you'll be able to see the article without receiving a prompt to login. If you would like to read more from the same source and choose to click on another story, you'll be taken to a registration prompt. We like to think of First click free as a simple system that allows you to test drive a news source before signing up on their site.
Finally, if publishers of subscription-based sites aren’t a part of our First click free program, we’re still happy to include their content – we’ll just tag the source as “(subscription)” to let you know that when you click on that article, you'll be directed to a subscription page.
If you love the current features of Google News like First click free (or if you don’t) you can share your thoughts with us on the
Google News group
. We look forward to hearing from you!
Getting even more news via feeds
Friday, September 14, 2007
Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team
A few weeks ago we blogged about
how Google News personalization works
. Now let's take a look at getting the most out of Google News feeds.
For one thing, you can get articles from your favorite news source directly on your
iGoogle
page. Here’s what you need to do: perform a Google News search using our
site: operator
. In the results page click on the link "RSS" or "Atom" located on the lefthand side of your screen. You’ll be taken to a new page that lets you choose where to receive this feed. You can add this feed to your iGoogle page, your favorite newsreader or another application you like.
Remember that you can subscribe to feeds for any sections of your personalized Google News homepage, or for any of the queries you perform in Google News. Another very nifty use of feeds: you can also subscribe to the content of almost all of our 41 editions. So if you speak another language, or just get a kick out of reading news headlines in different languages, you can set up as many feeds as you like for as many topics as you like. For instance, let’s say that you only care about articles on “Google” coming from the Italian edition, but don’t want to create a dedicated section on your Google News homepage for this topic. Here’s what you can do:
- go to the Italian edition of Google News using the link available at the bottom of our homepage
- perform a search for “Google"
- click on the RSS or Atom feed links in the results page (placed in the same location for all our editions)
- subscribe to the feed.
Don’t forget to check out our
Terms of Use
and feel free to post on our
Help Group
to share ideas and tips from other news fans.
Original stories, from the source
Friday, August 31, 2007
Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager
Today we’re launching a new feature on Google News that will help you quickly and easily find original stories from news publishers
--
including stories from some of the top news agencies in the world, such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press
--
and go directly to the original source to read more.
Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News. However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. Enter “duplicate detection.” Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of 20 “different” articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away.
By removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content. Previously, some of this content could be harder to find on Google News, and as a result of this change, you'll have easier access to more of this content, and publishers will likely receive more traffic to their original content.
Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press don't have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. As a result, we’re hosting it on Google News.
Duplicate detection isn't just for our news agency partners -- it also enables you to find the original copy of articles from publishers and news agencies that have their own destination site. For these publishers, we’ll continue to show just a snippet of the story and a link, so you can read the full story on their site.
We hope you agree this will improve your Google News experience. As always, we welcome
your feedback.
Would you like video with that?
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Posted by Lucy Zhang, News Engineering Team
One of our goals at Google News is to offer as many different perspectives on the news as possible. That means bringing content from multiple sources together in a way we hope you find to be organized and relevant. Now we're adding video to the mix: we're showing related news videos along with our news articles to give you a broader spectrum of info available. You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there.
Today, viewing news videos or other content types on the web can be a frustrating experience. You often get videos that don't play, sites that require different video player downloads, or have misleading descriptions of the content. That's why we're working with YouTube so you can easily view online videos without any downloads required and regardless of what browser you're using.
For our initial launch, we have included several top news sources such as CBS, Reuters, and a number of local Hearst TV stations. Over the next few months, we'll continue to add new sources as fast as we can. Right now we're just offering this addition in the U.S., the UK, and Ireland; we hope to make it available in other languages and editions soon.
We're excited to add this to your Google News experience, so give it a try and
let us know
what you think.
What's on your personalized News page?
Friday, August 17, 2007
Posted by Gina Bonzani, News Support Team
I "grew up" in Google supporting News and communicating directly with publishers and readers. One thought I’ve seen over and over is that people want to be able to see the news that interests them the most. And a great way to do that is to personalize your Google News homepage.
One of the easiest ways to personalize the News homepage is to move the sections that you most like to read to the top of your page and remove the sections you don’t. For me, that means no Sports section. Or, if you’re interested in a particular topic, you can use personalized News to create a custom section using a keyword. Many Google News readers use this feature to track their favorite sport or team. Others use custom sections to track politics, specific politicians or their own hot button issues. You can even get custom sections with articles from certain publishers (check out the search for
site:nola.com
), or articles written by sources from a certain state or country (like
location:CA
, for California). News publishers can even use custom sections to track which articles we’re crawling from their site.
I myself will be using a custom section to help me plan for my Jamaican vacation later this summer. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a wild season for hurricanes, so I’ve set up a custom section using the keywords [atlantic hurricane]. This section will help me stay up to date to see whether the season turns out as badly as predicted. (Even if I have to brave gale-force winds and rain for a couple of days, I’ll still have fun!)
Finally, if you use a feed reader (such as
Google Reader
) to read your news, you can get an RSS or Atom feed from your custom News section. Just click into your custom section and click on either the RSS or Atom link on the lefthand side of the page. For more info about feeds, check out our
online help content
.
We’d like to hear about how you're using personalized News to get the news that interests you. Visit the
Google News group
to tell everyone about your most creative or interesting personalized News section.
Perspectives about the news from people in the news
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Posted by Dan Meredith and Andy Golding, Software Engineers, News Team
We wanted to give you a heads-up on a new, experimental feature we'll be trying out on the Google News home page. Starting this week, we'll be displaying reader comments on stories in Google News, but with a bit of a twist...
We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.
As always, Google News will direct readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic. From bloggers to mainstream journalists, the journalists who help create the news we read every day occupy a critical place in the information age. But we're hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that -- whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates-- a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.
We're beginning this only in the US and then, based on how things go, we'll work to expand it to other languages and editions. We're excited about the possibilities of this new feature and we hope you are too, so if you've been covered in a news article please
send us your comments
and we'll work with you to post it on Google News.
Labels
announcements
30
currently in the news
13
features
43
Google News Blog
153
help for publishers
21
languages and editions
13
looking backward
7
Archive
2016
Sep
May
Apr
2015
Aug
2014
Aug
Feb
2013
Dec
Jun
Mar
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
May
Mar
Jan
2011
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
2010
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow