News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Google News highlights unique content with Editors’ Picks
Thursday, August 4, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
)
News organizations tell stories online in ways that bring together the best of traditional and digital journalism, whether that involves long-form investigative features, compelling photo slideshows or interactive maps and charts that add new levels of engagement to the day's news. To help connect you to the best works of news publishers, Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called "Editors' Picks,” and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to
recent improvements
we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News.
An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors' Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher's logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your
news preferences
. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors' Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.
You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks
as an experiment last year
. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they're interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites. We encourage any news organizations that are interested to visit our
Help Center
to get started.
Posted by Yogita Mehta, Software Engineer, Google News Team
$5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Posted by Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development
Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organizations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we’re eager to play our part on the technology side -- experimenting with
new ways
of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and
YouTube Direct
to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.
But while we're mostly focused on working with news organizations to develop better products for users, we also believe it's crucial to encourage innovation at the grassroots level. That's why we’re giving $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations that are working to develop new approaches to journalism in the digital age. Our aim is to benefit news publishers of all sizes.
We've granted $2 million to the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
, which has a proven track record of supporting programs that drive innovation in journalism. It will use $1 million to support U.S. grant-making in this crucial area. The other $1 million will augment the
Knight News Challenge
, which is accepting funding proposals from anyone, anywhere in the world, until Dec. 1. Now in its fifth year, the News Challenge has supported projects like
DocumentCloud
, which aims to bring more investigative-reporting source material online so anyone can find and read it.
We’re eager to do even more internationally, so we will be investing the remaining $3 million in journalism projects in other countries through a similar partnership. Stay tuned for more details early next year.
We hope these grants will help new ideas blossom and encourage experimentation. As Thomas Edison once said, "When there's no experimenting, there's no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward." We look forward to working with the journalism community to help digital news move forward.
[
Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
]
Extending the Associated Press as Hosted News partner
Monday, August 30, 2010
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
We’ve extended our existing licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. We look forward to future collaborations, including on ways Google and AP can work together to create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities. You can read more about our hosted news agreements in
this post
and
this one
.
Google News changes reflect your feedback
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Posted by Chris Beckmann, Product Manager
Two weeks ago we gave the Google News homepage a
new look and feel
with enhanced customization, discovery and sharing. This
redesign
was our biggest since Google News launched in beta in 2002.
Some of you told us that you really liked it, especially how the "News for you" section lets you see a stream of articles tailored to the interests you specify. The positive usage data we saw during our months-long tests of the redesign has continued since we introduced it to all users of the U.S. English edition, and hundreds of thousands of you have already customized your Google News homepages. But some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns.
At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating, so we've been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback. For example, we're now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story, rather than expanding the cluster when you hover your mouse over it. We've given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in "News for you": Two-column view, which shows the three top stories from each section and looks like this:
A key goal of the redesign was to give you more ways to personalize your Google News, and these changes add even more choices. A heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts with us. Please keep
letting us know
what you think, and we’ll keep working to make Google News even better.
Extra! Extra! Google News redesigned to be more customizable and shareable
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Posted by by Kevin Stolt, Software Engineer
There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the
Google News
homepage with
several changes
designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The new heart of the homepage is something we call "News for you": a stream of headlines automatically tailored to your interests. You can help us get it right by using the "Edit personalization" box to specify how much you’re interested in Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports or any subject you want to add (whether it’s the Supreme Court, the World Cup or synthetic biology). You can choose to view the stories by Section view or List view, and reveal more headlines by hovering over the headline with your mouse. We’ll remember your preferences each time you log in. If you don’t want customized Google News, hit "Reset personalization" to clear all personalization preferences. If you haven't previously customized and would prefer not to, simply save and close the "Edit personalization" box. You can always go back and change it later.
To give you more control over the news that you see, we’re now allowing you to choose which news sources you’d like to see more or less often. You can do so in News Settings. These sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, like in Gmail or Google Reader. When you’re in Google News, hit the question-mark key to pop up a full list of shortcuts.
There are the subjects that interest you and then there’s the major news of the day. To make it easy for you to find the big stories like Hurricane Alex, we’re adding links to topics that many outlets are covering. You’ll find these topics in the Top Stories section on the left side of the homepage as well as in linked keywords above headlines. Clicking on a topic link takes you to a list of related coverage that you can add to your news stream. You can change your preferences any time in "Edit personalization."
The redesigned Google News homepage is rolling out today in the English-language edition in the U.S., and we plan to expand it to all editions in the coming months. We’re making the ability to choose which sources you’ll see more or less often available in
all
English-language editions worldwide and plan to expand it soon. For more information about these changes, check out the video below or visit our
Help Center
.
Two more weeks to update your Google News Sitemap
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer
Almost five months ago, we
announced
a redesign for our Google News Sitemap. We wanted to give publishers plenty of advance notice so they could make a smooth transition to the new format.
This transition period will end on May 4, when we'll discontinue supporting all old-style Google News Sitemaps. If you are a publisher and haven't already shifted your Google News sitemap to the new format, we urge you to do so by following
these instructions
as soon as possible. This update is key to avoid interruption in crawling your content and allow our crawler to capture all necessary information about your articles.
If you've already made the changes to your sitemap, we thank you. There is no need to worry about this update. If you're interested in learning more about Google News sitemaps, we encourage you to read
this section of our Help Center
and submit a sitemap for your articles in Google News. You may also be interested in checking out our
Help Forum
where other publishers have shared useful tips and discussed other Sitemaps-related questions.
Don't forget to update your Google News Sitemaps. There are only
two more weeks
to go!
Open-sourcing the Living Stories format
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
have been experimenting with
Living Stories
, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the
Times
enlighten readers on such subjects as
global warming
, the
Afghanistan war
, the
N.F.L. playoffs
and
executive compensation
. The
Post
has used it to report on
health care reform
, the
Redskins' season
and the
overhaul of the D.C. school system
.
Since we
launched
this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.
In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're
open-sourcing the code
so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the
open-source documentation
for technical details; read our
Google News Help Forum
to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the
Times
and the
Post
are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.
In coming months, we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.
Fast Flip now available on Google News homepage
Friday, January 8, 2010
Posted by Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi, Software Engineers
Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, we're now displaying stories from Google
Fast Flip
, the article-reading service we
launched
in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites.
In December we
added
more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets news wires and TV and radio broadcasters, bringing the total number of news sources discoverable in Fast Flip to more than 90. Encouraged by the positive feedback we've received from users and partners, we decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the U.S. English version of
Google News
. As always, we welcome your
thoughts
.
More great news sources to discover in Fast Flip
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer
[
cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
]
Three months ago, we
launched
Google Fast Flip, a service that seeks to make reading articles online as fast and simple as flipping through a magazine or newspaper. It's still early in this experiment, which is why
Fast Flip
remains in Google Labs. But so far our initial thesis has held up: If you make it easier to read news online, people will read more of it. Users have told us they like being able to browse content so quickly, and we've been pleased with the amount of time they have spent reading articles in Fast Flip.
We've also received good feedback from the three dozen publishers who joined us for the launch, as well as a lot of interest from others. Today, we're excited to be adding articles from another two dozen publishers representing more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires and TV and radio broadcasters. Some of the new sources include Tribune Co. newspapers such as the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
, McClatchy Company newspapers such as the
Miami Herald
and the
Kansas City Star
, the
Huffington Post
,
Popular Science
,
Reuters
,
Public Radio International
,
POLITICO
and
U.S. News & World Report
. Now you can use Fast Flip to engage with content from even more of your favorite news outlets in an innovative way, and continue to explore topics covered by a diverse group of sources. And, through the
mobile version
, you can flip through all these new articles on your Android-powered device or iPhone.
While we're encouraged by the positive feedback about Fast Flip, it's just one of many experiments you'll see us try in partnership with news publishers. Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We're looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip. And if you have more suggestions for ways we can improve Fast Flip, please
let us know
.
Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
[
cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
]
There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring
potential solutions
. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline.
While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. So over the last few months we've been talking to a number of people to help develop the concept of something that we and some others in the industry call the "
living story
." Today, on Google Labs, we're unveiling some of the work we've done in partnership with two world-class news organizations: The News York Times and The Washington Post. The result of that experiment is the
Living Stories prototype
, which features new ways to interact with news and the quality of reporting you've come to expect from the reporters and editors at The Post and The Times. We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them.
The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.
This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.
Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We're also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you're a news reader, we'd love to hear
your thoughts
. If you're a news organization, we want to hear
your comments
on the Living Story
format
. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online. To see how Living Stories works, check out the video below.
Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. That's because Google News is a great source of readers, sending publishers about 1 billion clicks every month. Each of those clicks is an opportunity for publishers, allowing them to show ads, sell subscriptions and introduce readers to the great content they produce every day. While we think this offers a tremendous opportunity for any publisher who wants new readers, publishers are the ones who create the content and they're in control of it. If they decide they don't want to be in Google, it's easy to do. Today, we're making it even easier with a web crawler specifically for Google News.
Publishers have always had the ability to block Google from including their content in Google's index. How? With something called Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP) - a web-wide standard supported by all major search engines and any reputable company that crawls the web. When our crawler arrives at any site, it checks to see if there's a robots.txt file to make sure we have permission to crawl the site. With this file, or similar REP directives on specific pages, publishers can block their entire site, certain sections or individual pages. They can also give instructions on how they want us to index their content, such as telling us to exclude images or snippets of text. Furthermore, they can apply different instructions to different crawlers, giving access to some while blocking others.
The new Google News web crawler extends these controls to Google News. If they wanted to, it's always been easy for publishers to keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. They just had to fill out a simple
contact form
in our Help Center. Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP.
Our users shouldn't notice any difference. Google News will keep helping people discover the news they're looking for, different perspectives from across the world and new sources of information they might not otherwise have found.
While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been. It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index.
Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. But we respect publishers' wishes. If publishers don't want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it. We're excited about this change and will start rolling it out today. You can learn more about the details of this change on our
Webmaster Central blog
. If you see any problems or have any questions, please let us know.
Google and paid content
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both - the two aren't mutually exclusive. There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable. Today we're updating one of them, so we thought it would be a good time to remind publishers about some of their options.
Google has strict policies against what's known as
cloaking
: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting. While the anti-cloaking policies are important for users, they do create some challenges for publishers who charge for content. Our crawlers can't fill out a registration or payment form to see what's behind a site's paywall, but they need access to the information in order to index it.
One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request. First Click Free is a great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay. Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've
updated the program
so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.
In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking. We will then label such stories as "subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it.
These are two of the ways we allow publishers to make their subscription content discoverable, and we're going to keep talking with publishers to refine these methods. After all, whether you're offering your content for free or selling it, it's crucial that people find it. Google can help with that.
Connecting citizens and journalists with YouTube Direct
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics
[
cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
]
Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during
elections
. We see it during
earthquakes
,
fires
and other
natural disasters
. We see it on our
freeways
, in our
schools
and in our
public spaces
. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.
That's why we created
YouTube Direct
, a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites. Users can upload videos directly into this application, which also enables the hosting organization to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites. As always, these videos also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.
Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.
Already, we've seen
ABC News
, the
Huffington Post
,
NPR
,
Politico
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
Washington Post
, and
WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV
in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.
To get started, visit
youtube.com/direct
.
A new face to Google News Sitemaps
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer
Given the feedback we get from publishers, we've redesigned our interface to make Google News Sitemaps more flexible and easier to submit. [As a reminder, a Google News Sitemap is a file created by publishers which gives you even more control over the content you submit to Google News].
We're currently in the midst of an exciting transition period and need your help to avoid interruption in crawling your content.
To facilitate this transition, we'll have a six-month grandfather period during which you can continue to use the old format for any existing Sitemap that was originally submitted using the old format. Any new Sitemap submission must follow the new format. Please take a few minutes to make the shift. If no change is made by the end of the grandfather period, you'll no longer receive the benefits of having your articles crawled via a Google News Sitemap.
If your site is already included in Google News and you haven't submitted a Google News Sitemap yet, we encourage you to do so in order to manage your news content. Please visit our
updated instructions
for details on how to start using the new format.
Main changes in this release:
Publication Label Pulldown Menu:
The publication label pulldown menu no longer exists in Webmaster Tools. Instead, you should now attach the equivalent information to each individual article in your Sitemap, as described below.
Note:
For previously-submitted Sitemaps in the old format, we will "remember" the last publication label you selected from the pulldown menu and use that; however, please update to the new format as soon as you can.
New tags:
In place of the publication menu, there are now three tags that you can attach to each article in your Sitemap giving the equivalent information:
<publication>: Specifies the name and language of the publication that the article occurs in. Required.
<genres>: Specifies the nature of the article as a comma-separated list chosen from: PressRelease, Satire, Blog, OpEd, Opinion, and UserGenerated. Required whenever any of these properties applies to the article.
<access>: Specifies the accessibility of the article. Choices: Subscription or Registration. Required whenever either of the choices applies.
Please visit
this help article
for a complete description of the new News Sitemap format.
Title tags:
Article titles can be added using the <title> tag to help us identify the right title for your articles.
More options to resubmit your sitemap:
In addition to re-submitting your Google News Sitemap through your Webmaster Tools account, you can now resubmit it two other ways: robots.txt or ping. Note: The first time you submit your Sitemap, always use Webmaster Tools.
Check out
this page
for more details on the transition process, and please
let us know
if you have questions about your Google News Sitemap. Publishers can also visit the
Sitemaps section
of our User Help Forum, a place to ask questions, and interact with other users and Google guides.
Highlighting the diversity of content in Google News
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Posted by Rawan Hakeem, Google News Online Team
As you may know, we've always included some blogs from news organizations in Google News. However, we've heard from some of our users that the way we displayed these blogs in Google News was not very clear. To address this, we're now visibly marking articles published on a news blog with a "(blog)" label attached to the publication's name.
The same sources that were there before will still be available, and nothing will change in our rankings to impact where or how often they appear in Google News. We're making this change to ensure a high quality experience for our users and help them find these types of articles.
Here's an example to illustrate our change:
this article
from the blog section of the New York Times is now displayed under the name [
New York Times (blog)
].
If we crawl a blog-formatted site, all of the blog's articles should be assigned the "(blog)" tag. If you notice sites that are labeled incorrectly, please
let us know
.
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
.
Google News gets a makeover
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Posted by Frank Harris and Jason Morrow, User Experience Designers
Last month marked the 7-year anniversary of Google News. We thought we'd celebrate this year by refreshing the look and feel of the site with a new design that we launched today.
First of all, you'll probably notice that we've included new color frames around each section on the homepage. We've also added YouTube logos to our existing embedded
news videos
, helping you to identify and discover our partners' video content more easily:
We also updated our section pages, categories like "Top Stories," "World," and "Business," to add featured videos and photos from our partners. The new pages also contain sections for images and for popular stories on the right side of the screen, below the featured photos and videos. Just as with the
new story landing page
we launched last Thursday, our goal is to highlight more sources and provide our users with more ways to experience the news.
For example, take a look at the entertainment section below:
As with all features we introduce to Google News, these changes are designed to provide a better news browsing experience and connect you to a wide variety of perspectives on current events.
@googlenews on Twitter
Monday, April 27, 2009
Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer
Google News aggregates stories from over 25,000 news sources updated continuously. Starting today, we're offering users an additional channel to follow the news by posting links to top stories as they become available on the new
googlenews
Twitter account.
As with the Google News homepage, click on any headline that interests you and you'll go directly to the site which published that story.
Here are some of our first tweets:
More Hosted News partners in Europe!
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager
We're excited to announce today that 8 news agencies, which are members of the
European Pressphoto Agency
, will be joining our existing Hosted News partners. As with our existing agreements, these new partnerships will enable us to host and distribute EPA's original newswire content on Google News, highlighting the original contributions of even more newswire journalists providing you with access to stories right from the source. We hope to make EPA's content (which will also include ads) available in the coming months.
We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners as well as new ones to come, to help them distribute, promote, and earn revenue from their content.
For more information on Google News, visit:
news.google.com
.
Ads on Hosted News
Monday, March 16, 2009
Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager
As we mentioned
last month
, for some time we've been experimenting with a variety of ads on Google News. Our goal with all these programs is to provide the best experience for users, advertisers and publishers. You've already seen some examples such as ads in search results for news and ads in videos from our YouTube partners. Starting today, you'll also begin to see ads alongside full text articles that we
host
on Google News. That means that when you click on a Hosted News article, in addition to photographs, maps, and related stories, you'll also see contextually relevant ads underneath the main story text.
We're always looking for ways to work with publishers to help them distribute, promote, and earn revenue from their content, whether they maintain their own destination website or not. We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners as well as new ones to come.
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