Extra! Extra! Google News redesigned to be more customizable and shareable

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 2:00 PM

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.

Krishna Bharat discusses the past and future of Google News

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 4:07 PM

Posted by Chris Gaither, Senior Manager, News Industry Relations

Krishna Bharat invented Google News more than eight years ago. His aim: help people easily find multiple perspectives on the news of the day by using computers to group together links to similar stories. Aside from a two-year stint in India to start our research and development operations there, Krishna has been working to improve Google News ever since.

Krishna visited the IJ-7 “innovation journalism” conference at Stanford University last week and held an on-stage conversation with David Nordfors, executive director of Stanford’s Center for Innovation and Communication. Below you can watch video of the conversation and hear from Krishna about why he created Google News, how it works, where it’s headed and why he’s optimistic about the future of professional journalism.

Starring stories in Google News

Monday, February 1, 2010 2:00 PM

Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer, Google News

A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.

Today, we are giving users even more options for following stories. Users can mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it, like they can with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News.


We hope you enjoy the new feature and welcome your feedback.

Fast Flip now available on Google News homepage

Friday, January 8, 2010 4:23 PM

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.

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

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 9:54 AM

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.

A new face to Google News Sitemaps

Thursday, November 5, 2009 2:13 PM

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.

Create and Share custom News sections

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 1:03 PM

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.

Suggest on Google News

Monday, August 31, 2009 4:24 PM

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!

A Call to News Publishers: How to Share Your Video

Sunday, June 28, 2009 9:00 PM

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

Sunday, June 21, 2009 7:02 PM

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!

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.

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

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

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

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

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.

Adding Google News to Your Site

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 10:07 AM

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager

Today we are launching a Google News-based element for the Google Search API.

With this element, you can embed a news slideshow on your page, showing headlines and previews of Google News Search results based on queries that you've selected. Here is an example of the NewsShow in action:



Adding this element to your site or blog is easy using our wizard. You select the size of the frame you want, the topics you're interested in, and the number of articles you want to show, and we'll build the code for you. Check out the documentation for more details.

If you are a webmaster or developer and have questions or feedback on using this and other APIs on your site, please join the conversation over at the Google AJAX API developer forum. You can also check out our post on the Ajax Search API Blog.

Cool Tool for News Use

Monday, November 10, 2008 12:04 PM

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Our friends at the Toolbar team recently launched Google Toolbar 5 for Internet Explorer out of beta in 40 languages. To celebrate this occasion and Toolbar's upcoming eighth birthday, we upgraded our Google News Toolbar gadget: You'll now find tabs with different Google News sections embedded directly into the toolbar, so you can read the news as soon as it breaks, browse top news headlines and images, all without having to leave the site you're on:

You can click through the different categories to see the top stories in the U.S., World, Entertainment, and Sci-Tech domains. When you find something you want to read, you can click on an article to open it in a new tab, or click "all news articles" to open the Google News page containing all related items on that particular topic.

To learn more about the different features on this new release of toolbar, visit toolbar.google.com/features.

Straight from the horse's mouth

Monday, October 13, 2008 8:26 AM

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager

With Google News, you can read what candidates are saying about a given topic. You can even compare what two of them are saying about the same topic. But it's also important to hear candidates deliver their own message themselves, in their own voice.

Today, we're adding another tool to the Google News suite to enable you to find and access political messages straight from the horse's mouth. Using the Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) technology already available on Labs, you can now search for and watch political videos right from the Google News election page.

Starting today, after reading an article about a topic that matters to you, you can quickly find out what the candidates have to say about it and hear them say it. Just enter the topic you're interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we'll search candidates' YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (all candidates, McCain's campaign, Obama's campaign or the presidential debates). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you're looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video. You can also share a given video with your friends (just click on ), in case they don't want to take your word for it. Keep in mind that speech-to-text technology is not perfect yet, and some transcriptions might contain some errors. But we think this tool will serve as a valuable resource as we count down to Election 2008.

Checking for political consistency (or inconsistency) has never been so simple. And as election day nears, keep checking our election-related projects.

Say what?

Thursday, September 25, 2008 9:24 AM

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

While political consistency (or inconsistency) can be funny, as John Stewart pointed out in a recent episode of the Daily Show, it can also be a serious political matter.

With upcoming elections in the United States and Canada, we've built a tool that you can use to compare what candidates and other political figures are saying about different issues: we call it "In Quotes." As you might know, Google News already extracts quotes from news articles. Even so, it was a pretty tedious process to compare what two people were saying about a particular topic.

As you might have guessed, In Quotes allows you to do just that. You can easily read what, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama have already said about the economy, education or energy (that's just the e's!). There are more people to select from beyond the US presidential candidates, though, and we also have customized lists of people and topics for Canada, the United Kingdom and India. You can scroll through quotes for each topic, or click the "spin" button to see a random quote for the issue. As with our existing quotes feature, the quotes are automatically selected from Google News articles. It's also worth pointing out that we've launched this feature in Google Labs, which means that it's an experimental feature for the moment.

If you dig on political gadgetry (like I do) you should check out Google's other election-related projects, or another cool take on quotations in the news. Happy spinning!

News without borders: search results across languages

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 12:56 PM

Posted by Mahesh KM, Software Engineer

One of our most important goals for Google News is to expose readers to a diverse range of journalistic viewpoints. This is why we think it's important to have hundreds, if not thousands of different sources for important stories. It's also why Google News is currently available in more than 20 languages.

We've recently released a feature which we call cross-language search, which will help you find even more perspectives when you search in Google News. Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.

You won't see results in different languages unless they're at least as good as those in your own language. This means it's more likely that you'll see results in other languages if you're using Google News in a country which doesn't have many online news sources. You'd also be more likely to see them if you're in a country in which more than one language is widely used, such as Canada or India. For a language which has lots of sources, like English, it's unlikely that you'll find a foreign-language result when you search normally on Google News -- especially if you're searching from within a monolingual country like the United States or the United Kingdom. However, if you were searching for a breaking story in another country, and sorting your results by date, you might see a foreign-language story from a local news source which has the latest coverage.

Similarly, if you type in a query in a foreign language, we'll know to display results from that language, no matter what version of Google News you're using. For example, if you use the Czech edition and want to see how the new Batman movie is being reviewed, we'll show you results from countries where it's already been released, in English and Czech. Or if you're reading the Spanish edition of Google News and want to learn more about the recent G8 summit, we'll show you results in English as well as Spanish, since 3 of the 8 countries in the G8 are Anglophone, and none are Spanish-speaking.