Google Does the News

rizen was among the countless readers who submitted that google does the news. They've added a new tab to their interface, and a CNNish sorta web page that indexes thousands of online news sites. Their technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!). I like that they combine related stories on the same subject. Nifty setup.

Comments

Why do slashdot stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

technology section is showing some Slashdot stories too (sweet!).

I don't see why they would. They probably already posted the article Slashdot is linking to before slashdot posts the story.

Slashdot isn't a news site as much as a community site. Most articles are just pointing to real news sites. Its the comments that gives this site the edge.

What About..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites that require a user/pass (nytimes, etc)?

Clean look and good international support

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

I know lots of news pages exist, but this is nice and clean. Plus, they seem to have a good amount of international news. I can see using this every day. Plus, it's nice not to be beaten over the head with layers, flash and such. Imagine that... just the news!

Methodology?

[Spazholio]

I thought Google's indexing/spidering system was innovative because it ranked pages in terms of how popular and prevalent they are on OTHER pages. I would think that it takes a small amount of time for this kind of "popularity" to build up. Are they changing their methods for the news section? Using their traditional methods, it wouldn't be "news" anymore. Is it just taking the headlines from the most popular websites and posting them there? Don't get me wrong, Google's the best at what it does, so this will probably end up being a good thing, I'm just curious about the methodologies employed.

Re:Sweetness and light...

[garcia]

Well, considering that most of those papers were still FULL of advertisements when I clicked any of the links, I am sure only a small part of their revenue will be gone.

When I clicked the link for a story that was from NYT it came up w/&PARTNER=GOOGLE in the headline (or something similar). Seems that b/c they have been linking to them before it isn't a problem, or they have new permission to do this?

Historical article...

[pVoid]

This thing is like Escher's hand drawing itself:

Google searches for the news
ZDNet- 1hourago
Google unveiled on Monday an expanded test version of its search engine for current events and news, the latest step in the company's move into new markets.
Google Launches News ServicePCWorld
Google launches news search siteTelecomPaper(subscription)
CNET- and5related

Re:google's great, but....

[Omega1045]

The organizational structure of Google News is great! I love how they group related stories. At many top news sites, you can almost smell the bias of the reporter in the story. I like reading about a story from more than one source to get a better picture of what is really going on. Google is following their usual style of doing it simpler, faster and better than the competition.

How are sites selected for each story?

[tibbetts]

From Google's "About Google News" link:

The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement. This occasionally results in some articles appearing to be out of context.

This is an interesting development for Google. Ruling out the possibility of paid placement (for now), it seems as though PageRank doesn't apply to the news aggregator. (And how would it? Stories are updated continuously.) It's not likely to be completely random, either, although such an approach could lead to some very interesting story angles.

Re:the best part

[abhinavnath]

Oh hell yes! You don't know how hard I've looked for quality cricket and NFL coverage on the same page. The BBC has great cricket and a little NFL, but Google's page is great.

Strange how it didn't have much on the Premiership or other football though. I guess the ICC Champions Trophy [of cricket] is getting more coverage than whatever football there is.

Re:Sneak preview of upcoming Googlage

[Da Schmiz]

I second this... even though it's still technially in beta, the Google Glossary has long since replaced both Whatis.com and the Webopedia in my bookmarks.

Google Labs... another reason why I think Google is probably the best technology company on the face of the planet right now...

Slashgoo

[zero-one]

Slashdot is a site for commenting on the news, news.google.com finds the news. What about combining them to make a fully automated news discussion site? All the server would have to do is pick off the top n stories from Google news and feed them into the slash engine (or one of the slash cones). For bonus points, it could divide the news into different areas of interest. Anyone care to lend me some nice fast servers on with a fast Internet connection?

DANGER! Google is sucking us in!

[bshroyer]

Google is getting *way* to slick and useful. We've all seen it happen, and get hurt by it before (the "Original" Hotmail, dotMac, etc.) that a free service has wide appeal, and offers a truly valuable service. They make the competition irrelevant. They suck you in.

And then they start charging. Or they start advertising. Or they start offering paid placements.

Beware the free service.

Re:Regions

[wsapplegate]

What would be even better is link up that with their translation service, so I could get the American/British/Spanish/Whatever point of view in my native language (French in my case). Even if it would be a bit difficult to grasp the writers' ideas through the brain-damaged junk outputted by the translation software. Still, just having localized news pages (like the other services) would be great for a start. I encourage you to write to them about that.