Posted by Richard Gingras, Sr. Director, News & Social Products

Posted by Mayuresh Saoji, Product Manager, Google News

There’s something special about reading news on your tablet. Indeed, swiping through articles brings to mind the familiar feeling of flipping through a favorite magazine or newspaper. Starting today, Google News feels even more natural and fluid on tablet devices. For example:

• You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap “Explore in depth” to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story.
• We’ve also added more breathing room between articles, making it easier to spot the stories you really care about.

We think these improvements will help Google News send even more visits to news sites (six billion per month and counting).  

We’ll be rolling out this new experience in the US over the next few days. To give it a try, just visit news.google.com with your Nexus 7, Nexus 10, or iPad.

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager

Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them. Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search.

Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out the following features:

• Click-to-expand news results clusters: Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster. Click on the “Show more” link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for. 
• Multimedia: Within some of the expanded results clusters you’ll see a bar of videos and photos that relate to each cluster’s content. Click on any of these for more coverage of the story. 
• Layout updates: The cluster image now appears on the left and the source information has been moved to below the article links for better readability.

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder, Google News

Google News launched on September 22, 2002—exactly a decade ago.

Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them. Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.

In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.

As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline). In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.

Take a look back at the past decade in Google News through the top stories from each year and a few notable features that have launched in the interim:

It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. Smartphones and social networks have transformed how news is accessed and sourced, and shifted the relationship between readers and authors. Open journalism is the norm, and aggregation by humans and machines is an integral part of the ecosystem. New technologies such as Hangouts on Air have the potential to connect users, journalists and opinion makers and transform how stories are discussed.

Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.

(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog)

Posted by Rudy Galfi, Product Manager, Google News


The day after the historic 1929 stock market crash, Variety bannered their front page with these words: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG.” It’s a great headline: pithy, catchy, and expressive of the substance of the story as well as the scale of its consequences. It’s also worth noting that Variety’s editors had a full day to write the headline—millions of readers weren’t trying to search for the story within seconds of hearing about it.



The Web has transformed both how news organizations report information and the way users find it. Imagine if “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG” were used as a headline today by an online news site. Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.



To help solve this problem, today we’re excited to announce a news_keywords metatag. The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.



Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. Taking the Variety example above, news keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.



Keep in mind that this metatag will be one signal among many that our algorithms use to determine ranking. The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool — but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.



You can learn more about getting news_keywords set up by reading our Help Center article.

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager, Google News

When a story breaks, Google News is designed to give you the most relevant articles from a variety of sources — from national news outlets, to local points of view, to expert opinion pieces. To continue to expand your views on the news, we are adding three new features for those using our US edition: larger images on our main page; a new realtime coverage page to surface the latest articles and commentary; and relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective.

Get coverage in real time
Our new realtime coverage page is now available for every news story as soon as they become available to Google News. 

See relevant comments on top stories
Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

If you’d like to try these new Google+ features in News, it’s easy to upgrade here.  That said, if you prefer your Google News to contain just news stories and no Google+ posts, you can either log out of Google or turn off the display of Google+ posts via the Google News settings page.  

We’re rolling out all of these features over the next week, so don’t worry if you don’t see them immediately. Today’s updates are the latest examples of how we’re working to provide users with a beautiful, consistent experience across Google. So we hope you enjoy them.