Google News is fluent in Arabic!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 10:29 AM

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 for Singapore

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 10:11 AM

Posted by Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineer and Andrew McGlinchey, Product Manager

We'd like to welcome Google News Singapore, the newest edition of the Google News family. As with all our new edition launches, the English-language Singapore edition is tailored to provide a mix of locally relevant news as well as globally important events. We hope that our readers in Singapore can now reach the best news destinations on the internet even faster, and that news publishers in Singapore can connect to news readers even better.

This launch also reaffirms the global nature of Google's mission, and in particular the importance of Asia within that vision. At the start of 2008, we had nine editions in Asia: India (English and Hindi), Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel and an Arabic edition for the Middle East. Now, a year later, we have almost doubled our coverage by adding seven and a half editions in Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Pakistan, India (Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam) and Turkey. Why the half? We'll take partial credit for Turkey since it's in Europe as well as Asia.

If you're an English-language news publisher in Singapore -- or any other edition of Google News, for that matter -- and don't see your site on our editions, you can always contact us to request inclusion.

Google News in Telugu

Thursday, October 9, 2008 9:59 PM

Posted by Kiran Gunda, Software Engineer

During this festive season we are excited to welcome the newest member of the Google News family - Google News in Telugu. Like all Google News editions, the Telugu edition gathers news from several Telugu sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections.

We know that the 75 million strong Telugu speaking population wants to stay on top of current affairs and we hope this new edition makes it easier for them do so. The Telugu edition is our fifth Indian edition of Google News; we already have editions in English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.

As we've blogged about in our previous Indian language edition launches, one of the biggest challenges we faced was making sense of the many non-standard font-encodings used by various publications. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of the text because they are not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well established standard for exchange of text today, we strongly encourage news websites to adopt the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard.

If you are a Telugu news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can contact us to request inclusion. In some cases, we were not able to include news sites because of technical reasons having to do with the structure of the URL or proprietary encodings. You can learn much more about making sure your content is surfaced correctly by reading our documentation on Help for Publishers.

And then Google News came to Poland

Monday, September 29, 2008 2:42 PM

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist, News Online Team

We're thrilled to announce that we've launched Google News in yet another language: Polish! With this launch, Google News is now available in 23 languages and 48 country editions.

In addition to searching and browsing more than 300 news sources from their desktop, 40 million Polish speakers from Poland and around the world will also be able to find News results through an iPhone. These news results will also be blended into standard Google search results. So to quickly get an overview of what's happening in Poland right now, go to http://news.google.pl/

If you're a Polish speaker, you can check out what Przemysław Budkowski wrote about this launch on the Google Poland blog:

http://googlepolska.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-news-w-polsce.html

To all our Polish friends, welcome aboard!

Google News for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 2:24 PM

Posted by Rohit Ananthakrishna, Software Engineer

Over the last few weeks we've presented a number of new language launches for Google News: 9 new editions in Africa, a Turkish edition and a Malayalam language edition in India.

We're proud to present the three newest members of the Google News family: editions for Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan. These are all English language editions.

So, what does it mean to launch a new edition of Google News in a country? With these editions, we hope that readers in these countries can now reach the best news destinations on the internet even faster, and help news publishers better connect to news readers. If you are an English language news publisher in Malaysia, Philippines or Pakistan and don't see your site on our editions, please don't hesitate to contact us to request inclusion.

Google News in മലയാളം (Malayalam)

Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:40 AM

Posted by Cibu Johny and Deepak Raghuwanshi, Software Engineers

എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും ഓണാശംസകള്‍!

To all our Malayalam-speaking readers, we want to wish you Onashamsakal. We are very happy to mark this festive season with the launch of Google News in Malayalam. Like all Google news editions, the Malayalam edition gathers news from several Malayalam sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google news sections, we have a separate section for the Gulf Region, which has a large Malayalam-speaking population.

We know that the 35 million Malayalam speakers around the world want to stay on top of the current affairs. So this is our fourth Indian edition for Google News; we already have editions in English, Hindi and Tamil.

Some of the interesting challenges we faced while building this edition were making sense of the myriad font-encodings that exist in Malayalam, as in other Indian languages. This makes it very hard for search engines to make sense of text because it's not recognized correctly. Since Unicode is the well-established standard for exchange of text today, we make a plea to readers to contact the news site owners to change their site to use Unicode. The other interesting challenge was faced in preserving the Malayalam chillu characters. You can verify the configuration to view Malayalam in Unicode as described in this documentation.

If you are a Malayalam news publisher and don't see your site on our editions, you can contact us to request inclusion. We hope this edition will help Malayalam speakers the world over to find the best news in their language and find their news faster.

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.

More African countries now have their own edition of Google News

Thursday, August 14, 2008 11:28 AM

Posted by Divon Lan, Product Manager

Google News is a truly international project, spanning dozens of countries and over 20 languages. But that still leaves plenty of countries without their own dedicated edition of Google News.

Today, we are delighted to announce that we've made great progress in our quest to give Google News an even more global reach, by adding 9 more countries to our repertoire. If you head down to the bottom of any Google News page, you'll see new English editions in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

With these 9 new editions, Google News now has a significant presence on every one of the world's inhabited continents: 5 editions in North America; 7 editions in South America and the Caribbean; 19 editions in Europe (including Turkey); 11 editions in Asia, the Middle East and Oceania; and now 10 editions in Africa.

Google brings News to its Turkish users

Tuesday, August 12, 2008 4:01 PM

Posted by Mustafa Icil, Country Marketing Manager, Turkey

Today, we're delighted to announce the launch of Google News in Turkey. Now, Turkish-speaking users in Turkey and around the world are a click away from the latest news in their native language. The Google News Turkish edition crawls articles from more than 400 sources, so that news enthusiasts in Turkey can easily discover and read a wide variety of perspectives on important stories.

We think this is a significant step towards helping our Turkish users find even more content online. We're pleased to note that with this launch, we've made over 40 regional editions of Google News available in 22 different languages.

If you're interested, you can try out the Turkish edition at news.google.com.tr or haberler.google.com.tr.

Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 7:48 PM

Posted by Vinodh Kumar, Kiran Gunda and Prasanna Meda, Software Engineers

வணக்கம். தமிழில் செய்திகள்! (Greetings, News In Tamil!)

It's not every day that you get to launch a product in a more than 2,000-year-old language spoken by more than 70 million people. That's why we're excited to tell you that Google News is now available in Tamil. Tamil is one of the most widely-spoken languages in India, which is no mean feat considering that there are 22 official languages here.

The Google News Tamil edition indexes news from a large number of Tamil sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google News sections, we have seperate local sections for Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, regions that are home to millions of Tamilians. One issue we faced during the launch of the Tamil edition was incorporating news sites that do not use the Unicode based UTF-8 standard. We faced similar issues when we launched our Hindi edition last year. Since then, we are pleased to note that several Hindi news sites have shifted to the Unicode standard (and we encourage all publishers to do the same, so that more people can read your online publication.)

We hope this edition will help Tamil readers reach their online news destinations faster and help Tamil news publishers to connect more easily to their readers.

Now in the Czech Republic

Thursday, November 22, 2007 12:15 PM

Posted by Marián Dvorský, Software Engineer

The Czech edition of News was my first 20% project here at Google. Therefore I'm very excited to see it now live at news.google.cz.

Zprávy Google (as Google News is called in Czech) aggregates stories from hundreds of news sources in the Czech language. Stories are presented in sections similar to those in other editions. We have modified the Health section that is common to other editions to include travel and lifestyle articles as well.

I hope our Czech users will find the edition useful. For me it is now time to move on to an another exciting 20% project.

News is forever global

Friday, July 6, 2007 9:10 AM

Posted by Jaya Jha, Associate Product Manager

I was pretty excited when I found out that one of my first projects here was going to be to launch Google News in Hindi. Over 300 languages are spoken in India, and the chance to build a local product that people I knew would find useful was a pretty thrilling challenge. That one launch taught me a lot of things about how issues and challenges vary according to region, users and languages. It made it clear that users want news in their language, presented in a way that they appreciate the best, highlighting content that is most relevant to them. We also want Google News to give you the ability to find out what's happening locally in any part of the world, and give you the means to see a wide variety of global viewpoints on local news.

When and where to create a new edition of Google News is a complex process. We start by looking at a number of different factors in deciding where to launch next, but in the end, the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once we've decided on our next edition, we start adding sources to our news crawl. We try to identify as many news sites as possible prior to launch, and then add to those as publishers and users suggest other news sites to us once we're live. While the news sites in a given country are in the native language, we still need to translate all the other pages that make Google News possible, from navigation to help pages, into the new language. After that we do plenty of testing, and post-launch we work to improve each site with more sources and better results.

So far our news internationalization team has built Google News for 18 languages, 41 editions. Most recently, we've added a Greek version of News to our list of international editions. Of course, there are always more languages to offer, more countries to reach, more features to be built for each edition, and more content to be organized and made accessible. We look forward to bringing you many more changes and improvements in the coming months.