Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, News & Social Team

UPDATE: The News & Weather App is now available on iOS here.

News happens 24/7. To keep up with a fast-paced news cycle, you need a fast-paced app. That was our objective in updating Google News and Weather. It makes the news easier to browse, simpler to digest, and more easily tailored to the news you care about.

Upgrade to the latest version of the app or download it from Google Play here -- including a new tablet version -- for the best of Google News:

• Swipe through categories like Business, Technology and Sports or add your own sections for specific topics or places
• Tap into any story for a variety of viewpoints, including in-depth articles, op-eds, and local perspectives
• Get comprehensive coverage from over 65,000 publications worldwide, and a choice of more than 60 country-specific editions
• Sign in with your Google account to take all your customizations with you when you access Google News from any device—phone, tablet, or desktop

We’re rolling out the app to all compatible Android devices and locations globally over the next few days, so stay tuned. We want as many users as possible to get a high quality Google News experience and look forward to launching on other platforms soon.

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

UPDATE: And even more good news as the Publisher Center is now up and running in all countries where Google News has an edition. (Dec 16 2014)

UPDATE: The Publisher Center is now available for publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain as well as in all 21 countries where a Google News edition is available in English. (October 27 2014)

If you are a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time.  Until now, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might not have discovered them unless you told us.  And that meant they might not have shown up in Google News, which in turn could have resulted in readers not seeing your great content.  To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make changes to our record of your news site using the just-launched Google News Publisher Center.

With the Publisher Center, you can benefit from better discovery and classification of your content and you can directly make the following changes:

• Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
• Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014)
• Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)

Try it out, or learn more about how to get started.

At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t.  Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.

Posted by Richard Gingras
Senior Director, News & Social Products

In the digital era it’s easy to read stories from around the globe connecting us to a million different views and opinions. But what does that mean for local news? Where does the so called “Daily Bugle” fit into our regular diet of news consumption?

Well, despite the plethora of media outlets, most people cite the local paper as one of their top news sources. This is underlined by a National Newspaper Association survey that came out this month showing that two-thirds of residents in small towns across America depend on their local paper for news and information.

In order to ensure that community newspapers can endure, Google has developed a landmark deal with the Local Media Consortium. The partnership means this industry body - made up of more than 800 daily newspapers and 200 local broadcast stations - can tap into the power of Google’s ads technology to help fund and support the local journalism that so many people cherish and rely on.

For me that local touchstone is the Los Altos Town Crier and the Mountain View Voice, which help keep me up-to-date on the latest shenanigans over a new building development, news about the local high school sports teams, and the ever-fascinating police log.

To find out more details on this partnership, visit our DoubleClick Publisher blog.

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News and Social

Increasingly people are reading News “on the go” and using their smartphones to keep abreast of the latest happenings around the globe. Over the next few days Google News readers on Android and iOS devices will start to see a beautiful new version of the mobile web app that will provide an improved overall experience resulting in a kind of real time news desk for you on your phone.

Here are just some of the highlights:

• Improved overall look-and-feel making it easier to read and track separate stories.
• Ability to customize the webapp to suit your taste by changing the theme from light to dark, the font size and opting for a larger “story card” with more information per story at your fingertips (from the Settings menu, at top right).
• Simplified navigation to any section within News; just click on the Google News icon (top left) to see a list of available sections (including any custom sections you created).
• Easier integration with Google Feedback located in the menu at the top right.

Additionally we have ensured that some favorite desktop features have been included such as:

• A weather gadget in the Local section.
• The popular “Editors Picks” option.
• Social posts from Google + related to the story are included in the article cluster.

We’re launching in the US first and plan to bring the same experience to all our international editions soon.

All this goodness is packaged in a browser so give it a try by just visiting news.google.com from the Chrome/Safari browser on either Android or iOS phones.

Anand Paka, Google News Product Manager

Did my favorite team win or lose? Should I carry sunscreen or rain gear when I go hiking this weekend? And what did I miss in the world of technology and business? These quintessential questions of the day are all ones that Google News can provide quick answers to with some nifty new features. The aim is all about making news more relevant and useful to you by surfacing content that you might need in a hurry.

1. For avid sports fans, a newly introduced “Sports Scores” section on the News homepage and the Sports page will give a snapshot of live, recently concluded and imminent sporting activity. From this summary, it’s easy to dive in further and do things like click on a score for details of the match or on a specific team to get recent news about it. The section is customizable; for example, if you prefer not to see hockey scores, you can turn hockey ‘off’ while keeping the other sports ‘on’. You can also remove the entire section if you prefer. At the outset, we’re launching in the US, with the big four sporting organizations covering basketball, football, baseball and hockey. Over time, this section will expand to other countries and sports. Stay tuned.

2. Our homepage also has a new Weather section on the right-hand column. With a quick glance, this section lets you see the 4-day weather forecast starting from today. The weather section is ‘smart’ - it defaults to show the weather for your current location. (As with local news, you can set this location manually.) We think this is a neat feature as you can track local weather conditions right next to the top stories without having to jump elsewhere to get this information.

3.The Editors’ Picks section has been a great channel for publishers and readers alike. It offers publishers a unique way to showcase their best work and build their brand, while enabling readers to discover great content that they might otherwise miss. Today we have extended Editors’ Picks from our homepage to our section pages so that you can now enjoy these hand picked articles for the particular section that you are reading at any given time. Editors’ Picks are now being introduced into the Technology and Business sections with plans to add more over time.



Look for these features the next time you visit Google News.

Posted by Richard Gingras, Sr. Director, News & Social Products

Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines. 

Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines. Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.

If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News [Edited 02/13/2013] Update: The new Google News experience for tablets is now available in most English editions worldwide. Hope you enjoy it! There’s something special about reading news on your tablet. Indeed, swiping through Google News on your tablet is a comfortable and effective way to find more articles from great publications that satisfy your needs and tickle your serendipitous interests. Starting today, Google News feels even more natural and fluid on tablet devices. For example:

• You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap “Explore in depth” to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story.
• We’ve also added more breathing room between articles, making it easier to spot the stories you really care about.

We think these improvements will help Google News send even more visits to news sites (six billion per month and counting).  

To give it a try, just visit news.google.com with your Nexus 7, Nexus 10, or iPad. 

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them. Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search. Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out the following features:

• Click-to-expand news results clusters: Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster. Click on the “Show more” link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for. 
• Multimedia: Within some of the expanded results clusters you’ll see a bar of videos and photos that relate to each cluster’s content. Click on any of these for more coverage of the story. 
• Layout updates: The cluster image now appears on the left and the source information has been moved to below the article links for better readability.

You can try this out by doing a search on Google News or by clicking on the “News” filter on the web search results page. We hope you like these changes and that they improve your experience searching the news.

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder, Google News

Google News launched on September 22, 2002—exactly a decade ago.

Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them. Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.

In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.

Google News today

As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline). In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.

Take a look back at the past decade in Google News through the top stories from each year and a few notable features that have launched in the interim:

 

It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. Smartphones and social networks have transformed how news is accessed and sourced, and shifted the relationship between readers and authors. Open journalism is the norm, and aggregation by humans and machines is an integral part of the ecosystem. New technologies such as Hangouts on Air have the potential to connect users, journalists and opinion makers and transform how stories are discussed.

Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog)

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager, Google News

The day after the historic 1929 stock market crash, Variety bannered their front page with these words: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” It’s a great headline: pithy, catchy, and expressive of the substance of the story as well as the scale of its consequences. It’s also worth noting that Variety’s editors had a full day to write the headline—millions of readers weren’t trying to search for the story within seconds of hearing about it.

The Web has transformed both how news organizations report information and the way users find it. Imagine if “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG” were used as a headline today by an online news site. Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.

To help solve this problem, today we’re excited to announce a news_keywords metatag. The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.

Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. Taking the Variety example above, news keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.

Keep in mind that this metatag will be one signal among many that our algorithms use to determine ranking. The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool -- but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.

You can learn more about getting news_keywords set up by reading our Help Center article.