Google News Blog - The Official Blog from the team at Google news

Search by Author on Google News

Sunday, June 21, 2009 7:02 PM



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

Thursday, May 14, 2009 3:43 PM



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

Monday, May 11, 2009 12:26 PM

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

Monday, May 4, 2009 12:37 PM



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

Monday, April 27, 2009 1:39 PM

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

Monday, April 20, 2009 12:17 PM

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.

The story, as it unfolded

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 4:13 PM

Posted by Nandini Seshadri, Software Engineer

When you visit Google News, you see the day's top news stories organized by section. You can then click through to any number of sources to read the news from different perspectives. Yet by their succinct nature, individual articles can only give partial snapshots of news stories that often develop over time, whether it's a couple of hours, days, or even weeks.

Last week, we introduced a new "Timeline of articles" feature that provides a chronological view of the chain of events that make up a story. To view the timeline for a story, click the "all news articles" link under any cluster of articles on Google News:



This will take you to a story page with relevant articles as well as a timeline on the right of page:



The story on the pirate attack of a U.S. ship in Somalia this week provides a good example of when the timeline can be helpful. The graph shows the evolution of the story from the pirate takeover of the ship on April 10th to the release of the ship's captain on the 12th. The timeline also shows the evolution of media attention and coverage of the story, with a peak of nearly 3000 indexed articles written when the standoff ended and the captain was freed.

The timeline of articles is one of several features we're bringing to Google News in the coming months. Stay tuned for these updates as they come, and until then, see how actual news stories unfold using the timeline.

Local news in more places

Friday, March 27, 2009 3:24 PM



Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and this week we launched this feature of Google News to users in the UK, India, and Canada.

Local news sections let you keep track of current events in your area. We analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. 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.

To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city, state, 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 the 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. To finish, click "Add Section" and you'll see this local section on your personalized Google News page.

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

New Insights for your Search

Monday, March 23, 2009 2:42 PM



Some of you may already be familiar with Google Insights for Search, which launched last August.

Much like Google Trends, you can use Insights for Search to analyze search volume patterns over time, as well as related queries and rising searches. You can also compare search trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Insights for Search can help you can analyze everything from interest levels in rival soccer teams to the relative popularity of politicians.

Today the Insights for Search team launched additional features that allow you to see what the world is searching for beyond Google Web Search, by adding new data sources including Google News, Image Search, and Product Search. The new Insights for Search lets you break down search data in several ways. For starters, you can take a look at the rising News searches over the past 7, 30, or 90 days.

You can also view the popularity of a given query across different geographies, from country-level down to individual metropolitan areas. For journalists and newspapers, this feature could be a useful tool to gauge interest levels in different subjects among a reader base.

For instance, with March Madness in full swing, I was curious to see if interest in basketball runs equally high throughout the U.S. I tried a search for "NCAA" queries on Google News over the past 7 days, and found that interest was predictably high across much of the U.S. yet markedly higher in Kentucky, Iowa, and Kansas, as you can see on the map below:

Of course, Insights for Search can't quite explain these search asymmetries, but they're interesting to note nonetheless!

To learn more about this new release of Insights for Search, head over to the Inside Adwords blog, or start exploring right away on the Google Insights for Search homepage.

More Hosted News partners in Europe!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:00 AM



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.