Google News Blog

Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

2009-12-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-02T08:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

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.

New Google News for mobile

2009-11-19T14:04:00.001-08:00

Posted by Ankit "Chunky" Gupta (Software Engineer) and Alok Goel (Product Manager)
[cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog]

At Google, we are committed to giving you a consistent user experience across products and devices, and we really value the feedback you've given us about Google News for mobile. Today we're excited to announce a completely new Google News offering for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. (We already offer a mobile-optimized version of Google News for other phones, such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, and more improvements will be coming to those in the near future)

This new version provides the same richness and personalization on your phone as Google News provides on desktop. Our new homepage displays more stories, sources, and images while keeping a familiar look and feel. Also, you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks. If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too.

Google News for mobile is now available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

So pick up your mobile phone and point your browser to http://news.google.com to catch up on news anytime and anywhere. Feel free to check out more information or leave feedback in our Help Center.

Connecting citizens and journalists with YouTube Direct

2009-11-17T06:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-05T14:13:00.000-08:00

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.

this help article

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.

Create and Share custom News sections

2009-11-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Posted by Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, Google News Software Engineers

Today, Google News is making it even easier to follow the latest stories on whatever subjects interest you. We are happy to announce our Custom sections directory, which gives users of some of our English-language editions the expanded ability to create comprehensive sections to put on their Google News home page or share with other users.

One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this so we've allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.

Now, if you're using Google News and can't find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit.

We have created an initial set of sections to get you started. There's one on Space, and others on topics such as U.S. Foreign Policy, Global Trade, Solar Power, and Hollywood. If you like them, click on "Add this section" and they'll appear on your home page.

The feature is currently available in the Google News editions for Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and we look forward to expanding it soon.

Please visit our Help Center for more information on how to subscribe to custom sections or create them.

Local news now available in France

2009-11-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Posted by Mikey Levine, Software engineer

Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and later in the UK, India, Canada and Germany. Today we're delighted to let you know that we're making this feature available for France.

The Local news section lets you keep track of current events in your area. Once implemented, the top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results, and our rankings also take into account a publication's location to promote local sources for each story.

We work hard to improve our algorithm, including its ability to understand the relevant locations for a news story and the location of the source that reports a story. We also train our algorithm to detect when a news article is reporting about a particular location and when it's not. The city of Paris (also a world celebrity) has proven particularly challenging in this respect.

How can I add Local News to my Google News homepage?
To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city or postal code in the local search bar, shown here:

If you don't see this section, you can also set up your local news by clicking "Personalize this page" on the top right of the page. On the menu that comes up, click "Add a local section":

Once you've clicked on this local section link, you'll see a place to enter a postal code or city. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you'd like to see. Once you click "Add Section" you'll see this section on your personalized Google News page.

As always, we're always working to improve our product, and appreciate your feedback.

Highlighting the diversity of content in Google News

2009-09-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

2009-09-14T16:00:00.001-07:00

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Engineer, Google News
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.

Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!

Google News is fluent in Arabic!

2009-09-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

Posted by William Kanaan, Middle East and North Africa Product Manager

We're delighted to announce the launch of four new Arabic editions of Google News for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Users in these countries can now access their country-specific news editions and get the latest headlines in topics such as Business, Sports, Entertainment and more.

With more than 40 million Arabic-speaking internet users across multiple countries, we understand the need to provide our users with the most relevant news for their region. Like all Google News editions, our computer-generated Arabic editions aggregate headlines from thousands of news outlets around the world, group similar stories together and link directly to the original sources that publish these stories. This enables users to search for topics they're interested in, and read a wide variety of perspectives from different sources. It also enables publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience, thus increasing traffic to their site.

If you'd like to see a site included in Google News, or would like to send feedback our way, please contact us.

We're very excited to offer this service to our Arabic users in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and we look forward to covering the rest of the Arab countries in the near future!

Google News Tips for Publishers

2009-09-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
[cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog]

During my stint on the "How Google Works Tour: Seattle", I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News:

Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from "The Times" to "The San Francisco Bay Area Times"—help me target my local audience in News Search?

No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.

What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?

We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl.

To get the full scoop, check out the video (filmed by Michael Wyszomierski of our Search Quality Team) or the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ!

Suggest on Google News

2009-08-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

Posted by Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers

Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.

As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:

We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!

Looking Backward: Nominating a new Justice

2009-08-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

A few minutes ago, the United States Senate voted 68-31 in favor of confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the newest addition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor's confirmation followed three days of debate on the Senate floor, and was preceded by a series of lengthy and widely-reported confirmation hearings in July. A simple search for [Sotomayor] on Google News yields articles from thousands of sources covering this developing story.

Judge Sotomayor will soon become part of an elite group of Americans, as the 111th Justice to serve on the Court. The process by which new Justices are vetted and confirmed for this powerful body has long been a subject of intense media interest. As history was being made this week, I took a look back using News Archive Search's Timeline view for the term [supreme court confirmation]. While browsing the archives, common threads in media coverage of Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings jumped out at me. I've included some articles below from the last 75 years of Supreme Court History.

These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:

Morning Star - Jul 23, 1993

St. Petersburg Times - Aug 13, 1937

The Deseret News. - Jul 5, 1987

Eugene Register-Guard - Mar 21, 1939

Pardon Our Dust: Temporary Issues with Webmaster Tools

2009-08-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

Posted by Abe Epton, Publisher Support Team

Google News publishers have long made use of Webmaster Tools to submit and update their News sitemaps, as well as learn more about how Google is crawling their site. Recently, the Webmaster Tools site underwent a major makeover designed to make it easier for publishers to use. As part of this process, Google News is working to improve our interaction with Webmaster Tools and help news publishers take advantage of some of WMT's helpful new features.

Unfortunately, this also means that there are currently a few issues that publishers are seeing. We wanted to let you know what they were, and reassure you that we're working on them. While there may be some sawdust and loose nails lying around at the moment, it won't be long before a sturdy new edifice has been completed, and we think publishers will agree that the hard work will have been worth it. For the moment, however:

Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" () even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.
From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.

We apologize for the inconvenience these issues may be causing you. We're working hard to improve the sitemap submission experience, and think you'll be pleased with the results.

Extra! Extra! Updates from our growing newspaper archives

2009-08-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Working with News Publishers

2009-07-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We're constantly talking with web publishers, including those in the news industry, about how their content is indexed by search engines. Last week in Europe, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." We agree, and that's how things stand today.

More than 25,000 news organizations across the globe choose to make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read -- Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month. If at any point a web publisher feels as though we're not delivering value to them and wants us to stop indexing their content, they're able to do so quickly and effectively. To read more on this issue, see our post on the European Public Policy blog.

Looking Backward: Happy anniversary, Walkman!

2009-07-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

Thirty years ago this week, Sony introduced the first Walkman to consumers in Japan. Released on July 1, 1979, the model TPS-L2 was the first in a long history of portable stereo devices. The shape, size, and data format of portable music players continues to evolve, but for many people my age the Sony Walkman was their first music device.

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, my Sony Walkman cassette player was my most prized possession, and an important part of my identity. My first tapes were Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. While my little iPod shuffle can easily hold dozens of cassettes' worth of songs, it's hard to imagine developing the same degree of affection that I held for my first Walkman.

On this 30th anniversary of it's release, I took a look back using News archive search's Timeline view for the term [walkman], focusing on articles from the United States in the 1980s. These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:

The Milwaukee Sentinel - Jun 24, 1983

The Spokesman-Review - Aug 15, 1982

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Jul 16, 1982

The Age - Dec 3, 1981

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Aug 1, 2004

For folks looking for more information from the early days of the Walkman, I found some the following magazine articles in Google Books, including a review in the September 1981 issue of Popular Science and this ad in the February 1984 issue.

A Call to News Publishers: How to Share Your Video

2009-06-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager

We're always looking for ways to enhance the way people consume the news, and we have some improvements planned over the next few months. To get things started, Google News and YouTube are teaming up to help news publishers build a bigger audience for their video content.

Today we are inviting any professional news outlet that is already included as one of the 25,000+ sources in Google News to become an official partner on YouTube and more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News. Not already included in Google News? Just submit your site here for review.

Here are some of the benefits for News publishers who join the YouTube Partner Program:

Featured Premium Placement. YouTube news partners receive featured placement on the YouTube news page, youtube.com/news, where we feature news videos from partners related to the top news stories on Google News. In addition, if you allow your videos to be embedded, they'll be eligible to appear on Google News, which means additional exposure to all Google News users.

Cut Costs, Generate Revenue. YouTube offers free hosting for all of your video content and allows you to embed your videos anywhere on the web for free. And as an official YouTube partner, you're eligible to participate in an advertising revenue share program.

Viewership Analysis. Learn more about the people viewing and interacting with your videos. Use YouTube's Insight tool to easily discover troves of useful demographic information and understand what parts of your videos people liked or didn't like. Geographic information provided can help you focus your marketing efforts.

Wider Audience. YouTube and Google News have millions of visitors every day searching for the latest news and information. Raise awareness around your brand and reach new audiences by making your video content available on YouTube and Google News. As a YouTube partner, you can maintain your brand's look-and-feel with your own customized YouTube channel, and you can also drive traffic back to your own website.

Community. At its core, YouTube is a rich social environment that includes thousands of micro-communities. Build one around your content by encouraging people to interact through comments and video responses. Take advantage of YouTube as a social platform.

To get started, apply to the YouTube Partner Program. Don't forget to include the website of your news organization in the "Company Web Site" field on your application form -- this is critical to having your application approved. If you don't already have a YouTube account, make sure to use an email address with the same domain as your website (e.g. johndoe@newswebsite.com) when registering.

Once your application has been reviewed, you will receive an email confirming whether you are included in the YouTube Partner Program. If you are included, you will have the option to participate in revenue sharing and customize your branded channel.

The Google News team will do a separate review and follow-up about including your videos in Google News.

For more details on becoming a YouTube partner, please visit our Partner Benefits page. For a more in-depth explanation of submitting your video content for inclusion on Google News, take a look at our Help Center article: Video and other multimedia content. Please submit any questions through our Help Center.

Search by Author on Google News

2009-06-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

Posted by Nemanja Petrovic, Research Engineer

The Google News home page is a good place to go to find headlines from publications around the world. But what if you're interested in the work of a specific journalist in addition to perspectives from different publications? Last Thursday, we launched a feature that highlights the contributions of journalists everywhere by allowing you to find more articles by individual reporters.

If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they've written:

You can also search for articles by a specific journalist under Advanced Search or by searching their name after "author:" in the Google News search box. For example, this feature allows you to follow the most recent stories by your favorite columnists or local journalists. Here I searched for content by Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly:

As with any search on Google News, you can sign up to get the latest results through an RSS feed or email alerts.

We're constantly working to increase the ways in which you can interact with the news, and we hope you'll like the new ability to search by author. With over 25,000 news sources crawled on Google News, we value the diversity of perspectives on the news, but there's also something to be said for being able to find and follow the voices of the journalists you like best!

Google News gets a makeover

2009-05-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

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.

More ways to see the story

2009-05-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

Posted by David Ganzhorn and Corrie Scalisi, Software Engineers

Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the "all [#] news articles" link of each cluster of articles which cover the same news event--or "story," as we say on the Google News team.

The story page includes timely and relevant information from different sources indexed in Google News. Depending on the most recent coverage and materials available for a given story, the page features top articles, quotes from the people in the story, and posts from news blogs. You'll also find image thumbnails, videos, articles from sources based near the story, and a timeline of articles to trace media coverage of the story.

For instance, take a look at the LA Lakers' win over the Houston Rockets in the NBA Playoffs above. When you click through to the story page, you can see a quote by Lakers Point Guard Derek Fisher reflecting on the game, a set of images from the game, and reactions to the game on different news blogs. For those of you interested in the reaction on the ground, you'll also find local articles on the game written in Los Angeles and Houston:

As always, clicking on any article or image will take you right to the original source, while clicking on a partner video link opens up the video in a small window on the page.

Google News has always sought to provide you with a wide variety of perspectives on current events. Our new story page enables us to highlight more sources and provide our users with more ways to experience the news. As always, we're working to improve our product, and we appreciate your feedback.

Looking Backward: A historical perspective on influenza

2009-05-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

In the past few weeks, media outlets have exploded with stories about the growing number of cases of influenza A(H1N1). Also known as Swine Flu, the illness is being watched closely by governments and people around the world. Looking back through the archives of Google News, parallels to the current media climate jump out immediately from previous worldwide influenza outbreaks, in 1957 and again in 1968.

But the worst all influenza outbreak on record was the infamous global pandemic of 1918, which raged until 1920 and ended up claiming millions of lives around the world. I decided to take a long view on the cycle of illness and media coverage, using News archive search's Timeline view for the term influenza to focus in on articles from the United States in 1918. These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:

From the November 28, 1918 edition of The Deseret News

From the September 14, 1918 edition of The St. Petersburg Times

From the March 23, 1920 edition of The Deseret News

From the February 21, 1920 edition of The Toronto World

@googlenews on Twitter

2009-04-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

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:

Introducing Google News Timeline

2009-04-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

Posted by Andy Hertzfeld, Software Engineer

At Google, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to organize information. Today, we're announcing Google News Timeline--a new feature on Google Labs that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline.

Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search.

You can also add Blog Search results and sports scores, as well as information about books, music, movies, tv shows, video games, and even artists, to see how they've appeared over time. Try out some of our favorite queries like [jack nicholson movies], [barack obama quotes], or [baseball news photos].

To browse through time, you can specify a date in your search, drag the timeline of results, or set the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or even decades. In this example, I searched for arcade video games that came out in the 1990s:

We hope you'll enjoy exploring the Google News Timeline, and stay posted for more new features on Google Labs.