Juzer Burhani

Google News experiments with a lively and visually-rich design that shows images, videos, quotes, but also interesting and popular stories. There's a "featured photo" section that uses images from AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters, marking the first time when Google News promotes stories just because it has the permission to show associated images.



If you are logged in, the new interface personalizes all the sections, not just the front page, and you can switch to the non-personalized version to see the differences.

The footer is more lighthearted. "All the news that's fit to crawl. Auto-generated from over 4500 news sources, void where prohibited."



In June, Google News blog announced the new design, without getting into details. "Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism."

The New York Times says that Google News, Google’s semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth:

<<... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online. Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites. In the last two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and nytimes.com grew even faster.>>

If being among the top 10 news sites in the world is considered low, I suppose you’re in good shape. But I’m not sure exactly how these stats are created in any case; for instance, as the NYT article briefly mentions, Google News also appears as a “onebox” in normal Google web search results. And then there are Google News alerts, which will reach people via email. All of that is a lot of exposure, even when you don’t actively visit the Google News homepage. NYT quotes Google’s Marissa Mayer: “It directly feeds the main business.”

As far as Google News being ad-free to this day (at least when you visit the main Google News homepage and results), the NYT quotes anonymous Google employees suggesting that “concerns about antagonizing news publishers have guided some decisions at Google News, most notably the decision not to place ads”.

As mentioned previously here ...
The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest. From school menus to global warming, there is now literally a world of information at your fingertips.


To activate the Google News layer, navigate to the "Layers" menu on the left-hand side of Google Earth. Expanding the "Gallery" node in the layers tree will expose the "Google News" layer. Check the box next to the Google News layer and start zooming into the places on the globe in which you're interested. Each story is represented by a Google News icon on the globe. Clicking on the news icon opens up the news story's snippet, along with links to learn more about the event.

As promised last week during Where 2.0, there is now a new layer in Google Earth found under the Gallery layer folder called Google News. The layer shows placemarks for articles found in Google News georeferenced to location. Turn the layer on, and as you zoom into a region you'll see placemarks begin to appear - more as you get closer to a story. Each placemarks includes the headline for a story,and when you open the placemark you get the news source (e.g. Associated Press), an excerpt of the article, and a link to the original story. You'll also see links for similar related headlines from other news sources. The example shown in the screenshot is a search for "Sichuan" with the Google News layer turned on.

What's really interesting here is that Google is using new advanced search techniques to determine whether a story applies to that specific location. For example, I don't see any Paris, France stories appearing over Paris, Texas (or vice versa). And, according to talks I heard today from Google's Factory Tour of Search, they've also been working hard on the same technology extended to many languages. I would be interested to hear from people viewing Google Earth in other languages whether the new Google News layer works for them (leave a comment to this story).

Since there can be many news stories on any given day tied to a specific location, you will either see a spiral of placemarks for each story, a summary of news items on the same topic in a placemark, or if there's just a few placemarks they will "explode" from a single visible placemark into multiple ones when you click on the placemark.

Google will also be making this new layer available under the new "More..." button in Google Maps which was just introduced last week with Panoramio photos and Wikipedia stories. Now, what I'm wondering is that if those three will be combined in Google Maps that way, why didn't they include the new Google News layer under the Geographic Web layer for Google Earth? Maybe they want to experiment with it more with a larger audience before they combine it.