Google News Blog

Working with News Publishers

2009-07-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We're constantly talking with web publishers, including those in the news industry, about how their content is indexed by search engines. Last week in Europe, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." We agree, and that's how things stand today.

More than 25,000 news organizations across the globe choose to make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read -- Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month. If at any point a web publisher feels as though we're not delivering value to them and wants us to stop indexing their content, they're able to do so quickly and effectively. To read more on this issue, see our post on the European Public Policy blog.

Looking Backward: Happy anniversary, Walkman!

2009-07-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

Thirty years ago this week, Sony introduced the first Walkman to consumers in Japan. Released on July 1, 1979, the model TPS-L2 was the first in a long history of portable stereo devices. The shape, size, and data format of portable music players continues to evolve, but for many people my age the Sony Walkman was their first music device.

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, my Sony Walkman cassette player was my most prized possession, and an important part of my identity. My first tapes were Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. While my little iPod shuffle can easily hold dozens of cassettes' worth of songs, it's hard to imagine developing the same degree of affection that I held for my first Walkman.

On this 30th anniversary of it's release, I took a look back using News archive search's Timeline view for the term [walkman], focusing on articles from the United States in the 1980s. These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:

The Milwaukee Sentinel - Jun 24, 1983

The Spokesman-Review - Aug 15, 1982

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Jul 16, 1982

The Age - Dec 3, 1981

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Aug 1, 2004

For folks looking for more information from the early days of the Walkman, I found some the following magazine articles in Google Books, including a review in the September 1981 issue of Popular Science and this ad in the February 1984 issue.

A Call to News Publishers: How to Share Your Video

2009-06-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

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!

Google News gets a makeover

2009-05-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

Posted by Frank Harris and Jason Morrow, User Experience Designers

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

2009-05-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

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

2009-04-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

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

2009-04-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-27T15:24:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

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.

More Hosted News partners in Europe!

2009-03-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

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.

Ads on Hosted News

2009-03-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

As we mentioned last month, for some time we've been experimenting with a variety of ads on Google News. Our goal with all these programs is to provide the best experience for users, advertisers and publishers. You've already seen some examples such as ads in search results for news and ads in videos from our YouTube partners. Starting today, you'll also begin to see ads alongside full text articles that we host on Google News. That means that when you click on a Hosted News article, in addition to photographs, maps, and related stories, you'll also see contextually relevant ads underneath the main story text.

We're always looking for ways to work with publishers to help them distribute, promote, and earn revenue from their content, whether they maintain their own destination website or not. We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners as well as new ones to come.

Ads in Google News search results

2009-02-25T10:58:00.000-08:00

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

If you're in the US, starting today you may notice something a bit different when you search Google News.

Last November, we announced plans to begin experimenting with ads on a number of Google properties, including news query refinements within Google search. Today, we're continuing a similar experience for users by introducing ads on Google News search-results pages in the US. What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you'll see text ads alongside your News search results--similar to what you see on regular Google searches or Google Book Search.

In recent months we've been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We've always said that we'd unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we'll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too.

Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site

2009-02-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

Posted by Abe Epton, News Online Operations Team

From time to time, publishers ask us what they can do to improve their listings in Google News. The following are eight of the most frequent, and useful, pieces of advice we give out. Why eight? Because at Google, we love powers of 2.

* Keep the article body clean

For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by
tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article's body near the title in the HTML, we'll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.

* Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique

If you reuse article URLs, our system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don't resemble a year (for example, 5232 is ok, but 2008 is not.) You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse our crawler, and we may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page. You can learn more about some of these requirements here.

* Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps

Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps us better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format we use for this data here.

* Check your encoding

We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don't do this. It hurts us.

* Make your article publication dates explicit

In order to help our crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body. Also, you can remove other dates from the HTML of the article page, and add the required tag to articles in your News Sitemap. Dates on article pages can be in most common formats, but for sitemaps, we ask that you use the W3C format; e.g. 2008-12-29T06:30:00Z.

Note that the article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which we originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.

* Keep original content separate from press releases

If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you'd like us to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. As you may know, Google News labels press releases distinctly in order to alert our users that the article they're about to read is a press release. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they're labeled correctly. You can learn more about this attribute here.

* Format your images properly

To help Google News identify your images and crawl them along with your articles, use fairly large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make sure to place them near their respective article titles on the page and make the images inline and non-clickable. Images in the JPEG format are more likely to be crawled correctly.

* Article Titles in Google News

In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don't hyperlink the headline on the article page - after all, your reader is already there! And it's always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

If you found these suggestions helpful, you might also want to check out our more general Webmaster Guidelines. The Webmaster Guidelines aren't necessarily specific to Google News, but much of the wisdom you'll find there can help make your site Google News-friendly. Our Publisher Help Center contains lots more information about many of these topics. And you can always check out the Google News Help Forum to give us feedback on these suggestions, and share other tips and advice with webmasters and News users.

Adding Google News to Your Site

2009-02-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Google News for Singapore

2009-01-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Got questions? Got answers? Check out our new Help Forum.

2009-01-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

Posted by Abe Epton, News Support Team

Today we're launching the new version of the Google News Help Forum (formerly known as the Help Group), and we encourage you to check it out and post a question or two. The new forum incorporates a number of features we've heard requested, and we think the new format will make it even easier for questions to find answers. If you'd like to view a post from the previous version of the Forum, you can still search the Help Center for it, and the old URLs will still work. We really appreciate all the great discussions our users and publishers have participated in in our old Group, and we encourage everyone who used the old Group to check out the new Forum.

Cool Tool for News Use

2008-11-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Election results in real-time

2008-11-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Posted by Robert Leland, Software Engineer

Today, Americans all across the country are voting, and the results will soon be tallied. We'll make sure you can stay abreast of the election returns on the same Google News pages that already bring you current election news. We'll be providing results from the presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial races as they are reported by the Associated Press.

On the front page of Google News, you'll find a Google Map gadget showing real-time popular and electoral vote counts. On the Elections section page, you can see more detailed results. At the top of the right column we have summaries of the presidential race, and the races for majority control in the Senate and House. Beneath the summaries you can select a state in the pull-down menu. For each state we display the breakdown in votes for the presidency, governor (where there is a race), and for each Senate and House seat that's being contested. You can also follow the presidential election, and see a summary of the popular and electoral votes by visiting news.google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered mobile phone.

For more Google election tools, be sure to check out our 2008 Elections page. It features some useful Google Maps, including one which can give you the location of your polling place. So keep up with the results as they're reported, from wherever you are -- and be sure to add your vote to the tally!

Looking back in time for context

2008-10-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jack Hebert, Software Engineer

News coverage usually focuses on the most recent events, and when we first launched quotes, we did the same. However, past events frequently provide context that helps us better understand the present. With this in mind, we recently extended our quotes coverage back to 2003. Hopefully this new data (our quotes index grew 15x in size!) will help shed light on what people have thought and said over time, and how their views have changed.

As always, to find a person's quotes you can search for their name on Google News, and if we have any quotes from that person, they'll appear in a onebox at the top of the page. Click on the 'more by' link and from there you can simply browse through all our quotes from that person, or filter them to a specific year using the links on the left. Try comparing Alan Greenspan's quotes on the economy from 2004 to those from 2008:

People running for office are some of the most prolific speakers, especially on economic matters. In Quotes makes it easy to compare what McCain and Obama have said about the economy (or, try comparing Palin and Biden.)

Of course, quotes are not restricted to politics--there are also many from sports figures. See what Michael Phelps said about the 2004 and 2008 Olympic games, or what Roger Federer has been saying about Wimbledon.

Straight from the horse's mouth

2008-10-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Google News in Telugu

2008-10-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

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!