Googlified

Google News today added a new feature which you can find local news of any city of your choice (currently available in English only). To add the local news section to your Google News homepage, scroll down to the Local News section and enter the city name or zip code of your choice, or you can visit http://google.com/news?geo=[city] to search for any city’s news by replacing [city] with the city’s name or zip code.

In the post on the Google News Blog, Google reveal that Google News can read, and understand the news.

We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

(Okay, they didn’t really say that Google News can understand the whole thing, but) Something is fishy about this, and it reminds me of - Epic 2015! :)

Last month, Google News introduced a new feature that lets users to comment on news stories. Fast forward 31 days, there are only 105 comments posted so far.

I think this is mainly due to the complication of sending comments by email, which requires users to provide a way to verify their identities. Secondly, as I questioned when they initially launched this feature: how are they going to do all these verification process by human?

Oh, it’s actually 104 (as of now) if your sort them by date. :)

[via Micro Persuasion]

The Google News Blog announced that they will be hosting original contents from the Associated Press (sample news article), Agence France-Presse (sample), UK Press Association and the Canadian Press on Google News, so you don’t have to read the same wire story over and over and over again by removing the duplicated contents from the search results.

Google’s reasons?

Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press don’t have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. As a result, we’re hosting it on Google News.

Removing duplicate contents means sending less traffic to other news sites (though I kinda agree that it’s good for the users) and more page views on Google News, which translates into revenue if they choose to put “relevant advertisements” on the news articles.

Google News starts to include related news videos from YouTube along news articles “to give you a broader spectrum of info available.” Whenever you see a “Video” link beneath the title of the article, you can click on that link and open up the related YouTube video. Right now, the videos come from “several top news sources such as CBS, Reuters, and a number of local Hearst TV stations” and only available to the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland.

Shouldn’t Google include a video of Barack Obama for that news article though?

Google News is experimenting with a new feature that allows readers to add comments to news stories, which in turn lets “[other] users to find out the story behind a story and to know exactly what the people in the news think about the news.”

Unlike the way you comment on this blog (and many others), Google News requires you to send your comment to their email address, news-comments@google.com, along with a link to the story you are commenting on, your contact details (name, title, and organization), and a way to verify your email address.

You can learn more about the feature here.

I wonder what’s the brain-power load average of this feature.

Starting today, Google will be responsible for handling CNN.com’s searches, replacing Yahoo! Search. (Google cache, Web Archive)

Google News today launched an image version that allows users to “view and explore the top headlines of the day through photos instead of just text”. This is a product of months of work from feedbacks by the users, according to the Google News Blog.

Whenever you hover over a photo, the headlines list on the right will highlight the headline that’s related to the story, and displays a snippet of the news story.

Similarly, Google News has a text version that’s been around for a really long time, which is text only.

Google News is now displaying relevant stock quotes under result snippets that link to Google Finance.

Google today launched the Hindi version of Google News.

Google News gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections.

Indian Blogger Amit Agarwal mentioned the Hindi language on his blog numerous time, I guess he would be excited to see this, as well as millions of other Hindi speakers.

Google also added English to Hindi transliteration feature to the Blogger editor last week.