Google just announced that it is updating the design of the Google News reading experience on tablets, including the Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and iPad. The new design, says Google, will make the service feel “even more natural and fluid on tablet devices.” → Read More
Google just announced an update to Google News’ search results pages that makes some changes to the popular news site’s layout. Most importantly, Google News search now features click-to-expand news results clusters. As the name implies, these clusters will feature related stories from more sources and users will have to click on the new “Show more” link to see them. → Read More
Google News already featured some integration with Google+ in the past, but today, Google is expanding this integration by bringing “relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective” to its news aggregation site. Starting today, Google News users will be able to see what their circles, journalists covering the story and those who are the subject of the story have to say about it. Google News… → Read More
Whether you think gamification is the road that leads to a brighter future – or instead straight to the irreparable infantilization – of the Web, even the harshest of critics have to admit that there’s more to the concept than simply slapping some badges on a website, game or application, Foursquare-style. The more I read up on this new Google News Badges stuff, the more I think some people over… → Read More
For as long as I can remember, there has been one constant in tech news: Google News sucks at it.
Now, that’s not entirely fair since Google News doesn’t actually provide any of their own content. Instead, they use the supposedly magical Google algorithms to curate others’ content from around the web. Still, there’s just no way around it — the product, at least for tech news, sucks.
Again… → Read More
The first thing many of us do in the morning is check for earth shattering news, and Google has just made the quest to find relevant news a little bit easier by introducing a geolocation-enabled “News Near You” feature in its U.S. Edition.
While there are plenty of niche local news aggregators like Topix or Fwix available for local news junkies, Google News is the dominant player in the news… → Read More
There’s a lot of speculation about Google’s upcoming stab at social (take 15, or so, for those keeping track at home). The most recent talk has Google adding a social layer to all of their properties to tie them all together. One such property is actually already trying out such a layer — but it’s a social layer run by Twitter.
As Search Engine Land points out, Google News is currently in the… → Read More
Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.
A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.
Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to… → Read More
After months of testing, today Google News is unveiling “the biggest redesign since the beta launch in 2002,” says director of product management Ben Ling. The main new elements of the page include new navigation by trending topics in the left pane, a personalized news stream in the middle pane, and localized news and weather in the right-hand pane.
The whole idea is to make Google news more… → Read More
Google News is testing out a new design, as I reported earlier this month. It includes trending topics on the left and new personalization options. But today someone in the bucket test noticed something different. The sharing options changed. Each story can be shared via email, Google Reader, or Facebook.
Most people won’t see this. It is just in a limited test. But it does suggest that… → Read More
Google is already taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook with the recent launch of Buzz, which lets everyone on Gmail broadcast public status updates, share links, blog posts, photos, videos, and more. But Google, which tried and failed to buy Twitter last year, is still studying its various features and building some of them into its own services. The next one it might borrow from Twitter is… → Read More
Maybe the single most useful feature of Gmail for me is how you can “star” items to highlight them to come back to later. In Google Reader, this starring feature also exists and is hands-down the best feature of the service. Today, Google News added the same feature, and it’s also awesome.
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Google News. In fact, I think it’s pretty awful in many ways. But this is… → Read More
Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report, which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers.
The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both… → Read More
Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do… → Read More
Yesterday, Google threw complaining publishers a bone with its First Click Free program, which lets news sites limit the number of free clicks from Google News for any individual to five a day. News sites have long been accusing Google of profiting off of their news with Google News but today Google is making another concession to publishers.
Google is launching a new crawler that will let… → Read More
Today, the FTC held a hearing on the crisis in the (print) news publishing industry, which gave Rupert Murdoch yet another opportunity to publicly call out Google about its supposedly thieving ways. Google’s response: Hey, we send out 4 billion clicks a month to news sites. If you don’t now what to do with all that traffic, it’s not our fault. (I’m paraphrasing).
But Google also gave a… → Read More
If you’re interested in finding hot news on the web it’s not too hard — provided the topic is technology. Twitter, Tweetmeme, Techmeme, Digg, and the like all offer up a mixture of what’s hot in technology with varying degrees of success. But for other topics, it’s not so easy. That’s why Topicfire was built.
Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses… → Read More
Google News has just launched a pretty cool new feature: Create your own news section. As you can probably guess, this allows you to create a new area of your Google News personalized page (you have to be signed-in) for anything you want. You simply fill-out a section title, put in any search terms you want it to look for, select a country, and you’re set.
Previously, you could make customized… → Read More
Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the… → Read More
Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the… → Read More
Back in June, we broke the news that Google was working on a new visual way to display Google News then called “Flipper.” Today, at the TechCrunch50 conference, Google’s Marissa Mayer formally launched the product now known as Google Fast Flip.
As we wrote previously, the service puts a new face on Google News. Imagine going to a newsstand and looking at all the magazines lined up, only here… → Read More
Sometimes I actually feel sorry for old media. Blogs are taking all the page views and don’t have the massive cost overhead of newspapers and magazines. AOL is gobbling up magazine and other media writers by the hundreds.
And today I see this article talking about Google News Spotlight, which focuses on that supposedly last bastion of old media – investigative journalism. The stuff that’s “too… → Read More
The FIEG, an association of Italian editors, recently tried to sue Google’s News service. They claim: “Google is preventing editors from choosing freely which articles should be posted on the website”. The editors are also claiming that websites which don’t want to be published on Google News would also be automatically excluded from Google’s standard search results. → Read More
Last week, the Italian government began an investigation into Google and Google News about allegations of anti-competitive behavior. (For more details, read Google’s initial response or Danny Sullivan’s take). Italian newspaper publishers claim that Google News is stealing readers from them who skim the headlines on Google News and never bother to click through. It is a familiar refrain, to… → Read More
Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out).
On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which… → Read More
A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.
The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new… → Read More
There are a couple of places where you can go to get your fill of tech-related information and keep track of breaking news and events outside of your RSS reader or e-mail inbox. Google News isn’t one of those places (yet), but Techmeme and to a lesser degree Alltop, popurls and Digg are some of the most frequented websites when it comes to pleasing those who like to stay on top of hot tech news… → Read More
Google is about to launch a new Google Labs project it calls Flipper, we’ve learned. No, it’s not a dolphin. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks like the project is a more visual way to read Google News, or to “flip through it,” as it were.
While we have yet to use it, what looks nice about it is that you can not only browse by sections, but also by sources, keywords, and most importantly… → Read More
I’m sorry, but for as good as Google is at organizing the world’s data, Google News absolutely sucks. Now, to be fair, I’m going to focus on Google News from a tech news perspective, because that’s what I follow. Maybe it’s better in other areas, but I doubt it’s much better. I bring this up because a new update to the service today promised “More ways to see the story.” Okay, that’s true, as long… → Read More
Arianna Huffington testified today before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet in a hearing on the “Future of Journalism.” The Senate was contemplating the future of news, particularly newspapers, and will consider what (if any) action Congress needs to take to save the industry. Those who testified include Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User… → Read More
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