Google News service does not make use of the regular ranking algorithm ‘PageRank’ which is used by Google Search. Instead, it has its own unique ranking system which is based on a number of factors like user clicks, freshness of the article, geographical location and approximate authority of the publication on the particular news topic. This revelation was made by Josh Cohen who is the business product manager of Google News in a recent interview with Danny Sullivan.

A common complaint that is often put forward by news publishers especially the Italian counterparts is that Google does not provide adequate transparency about Google News system and the way it operates. Cohen clearly disagrees to this fact stating that the company started a news blog to make sure information regarding the same is available to all users and publishers. A recent blog titled ‘myths of Google News exposed’ was specifically on this argumentative subject.

He also mentioned that there is a special forum for publishers on Google News and also a help area which is exclusively for publishers to post any sort of queries they have regarding the site. It is true that the ranking system of Google News can seem like a mystery when compared with the regular Google Search but the company maintains the stand that they are doing everything to keep things simple and transparent for its publishers.

Cohen explained that by ‘story ranking’ does not mean a single story or news item but a cluster of publications or a group of related articles for a particular news item. The unique ranking algorithm of Google News can figure out how to cluster these related stories but within each cluster, the user can click on any individual story or news item.

He also stressed on the fact that the company does not employ any human editors but the entire editing process of Google News is left to its ranking system.

Popularity: 9% [?]

iPhone has got enough features to implement and stimulate the needs of people. Google Mobile Blog came up with this great news for iPhone users. Apart from them, the smart phone and Android users can avail this new redesigned Google News on their phones. The new version introduced is simple and at the same time easily accessible. It can be considered to be something interesting and similar to the desktop version which can be seen on Google News. There are just a few changes made on it to make it unique, fitting and appropriate on the mobile screen.

The latest design which has been come up by the giants have special additional features on it like images, stories and lot more specialized and personalized features. It is easy to use and at the same time the easy jump feature makes it easy to use and search.

The small widget like assistance from Google makes it easy to get into any news you wish to search. The search box is unique and easy check out the different categories easily. Apart from news you can also get into certain searches with Google on the ‘More” feature. Image is yet another button on the screen through which you can search for images right on your phone. Isn’t that a wonderful way of knowing the world your own way?

People are getting in with iPhone to avail all these splendid features to make things easy in your own way.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Google has added a new option to its search toolbelt called Page Preview which was recently noticed by its Operating System. When the user searches for a particular topic on Google’s search page and clicks on ‘search options,’ the ‘page preview’ tool will be displayed at the left hand side of the webpage. A longer snippet and a thumbnail will be displayed for each and every search result if the user clicks on the ‘page preview’ button.

A small problem is that the Google thumbnails form a relatively small part of the webpage and are not really useful all the time to the user. Also, the thumbnails from the search results pages are always merged together, hence it takes a long time for the resulting image to load.

For example, if you search for information on U2, then all the search results will be displayed and the ‘page preview’ button can be found on the left hand side as an option under Standard view. If you click on this button, the thumbnails for that particular search result will be displayed directly on the search results page itself as a small column.

Page Previews is not a new concept at all to the search industry. It has been done before by Ask.com with the binoculars tool and has been in use for quite some time now. Another problem while using the Page Preview option of Google is that there are many Firefox add-ons that add many page previews to the search results displayed on Google webpage.

To summarize, there is nothing new and innovative about the new ‘Page Preview’ option of Google Search. It merely helps you to visualize thumbnails of each individual search result which opens as a small window and hence is not very helpful to the user.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google seems to have received a lot of flak in the speeches given by Tom Curley, President of Associated Press, and Rupert Murdoch, CEO of the News Corp. Apparently; these digs were made at Google in the speeches given by both of them in the China summit on the 9th of this month.

The main point Curley stressed in his speech was the inappropriate lack of payment that AP receives for all its hard work. He viciously attacked the pirates of news who according to him are taking claims on their property. He said that all news organizations have to face a period of uncertainty while traversing the bridge from analog to digital journalism. Creating and marketing content will no longer be enough for news organizations to survive; Curley believes that their pricing will dip lower as more of their content is distributed.

Curley was also of the opinion that the search tool has revolutionized the way users now turn to the internet to know about everything including news. He said that AP has also tried out the simple idea of its own news blog but moved on after a while. Thus AP decided to go in for a collaborative approach to a news network environment with audience input from Twitter and Yahoo and the results and revenue have been phenomenal.

He also said that websites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube have become more favored among internet users for breaking news than the traditional news publishers. Against this, AP intends to start a News Registry which will basically be a rights management and tracking system. It is also planning to create a NewsGuide which will contain unique news content and will be curated by top news editors. He concluded saying that access to news must be in the general interest of the public and those who put in all the hard work should also profit accordingly.

Popularity: 2% [?]

“Fast Flip”, the online newspaper and magazine reader, was officially launched in the Google Labs on Sept 14th of this year. It is more of a Google skimmer than a flipper as it allows users to rapidly skim through loads of visually enhanced news articles procured from various partner publications.

Google Blog posted that “Fast Flip” will provide a new kind of reading experience to all its users combining the best features of both print and electronic media. Like traditional print papers and magazines, one can flip through bundles of news articles, stories and feeds from top publishers until you find something that suits your reading interest. Being an online site, you also have the advantage to search for relevant information and articles; “Fast Flip” also enables you to share content with your family and friends. Another interesting feature of this tool is that you can personalize the content by making selections and thus read news items and reports which interest you.

According to Larry Page who is Google’s co-founder, “Fast Flip” offers a personalized reading experience with rapid browsing, print-style navigation, recommendations from community members and extensive search ability.

A click on any of the news article will immediately take you to the publisher site. The top publishing partners of Google “Fast Flip” include Atlantic magazine, Fast Company, New York Times, ProPublica, Washington Post and Newsweek. Google has great expectations from its latest venture and banks on the fact that an improved user experience is directly proportional to lots of traffic and web visits. As far as revenue goes, Google intends to split the cash that is obtained from advertisements on the site with other publishers; if successful, this could turn out to be a goldmine for all.

“Fast Flip” can be considered as a successor to Google News and with this venture, the company is also testing out the new micropayments platform that it is developing. There is also good news for mobile users; Google has also launched a mobile version of the site called “tactile page flipping” for the iPhone and Android.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google News, which strikes the same chord as many traditional print dailies has launched its latest feature called ‘Spotlight’ which has content analogous to a weekly news magazine. Spotlight stems from a bunch of interesting reads that had a regular fan following among a select group of readers. This is what Google had to say about Spotlight’s contribution and function to its news webpage:

The newly launched Spotlight section of Google News has in-depth news stories and other interesting articles of value which undergo periodic updating by experts. Computer algorithms and applications are employed to automatically select these articles and news stories which cater to the reading interests of a wide range of users. Topics range from investigative journalism and opinion pieces to articles of special interest and lasting appeal. A single click can take you to the Spotlight section which is featured on the left side of the Google News webpage.

In spite of its many interesting and appealing stories and articles, the Spotlight section is strikingly similar to the rest of Google News in its visual look and style. This section is definitely an awesome addition to the existing webpage but personally I feel that Google can unleash more of its creative juices to make Spotlight more visually enhancing and appealing like a magazine to the user. It is ideal to make this the marketing analogy of Spotlight to rope in more and more users and will be the final nail on the coffin of other similar sites and traditional magazines. Give the readers a rich and eye catching visual experience to suit the lasting appeal of the featured stories and articles in Spotlight.

Nevertheless, there are many who are waiting eagerly to see the referral profile or usage type that will be generated around the Spotlight section.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google is now introducing a visual version of its news. It has been named the “Flipper”. Flipper enables the users to view the images of the publications. The user can literally flip through the pages. The system seems to be similar to two others currently in use. One is the Google News Timeline. It is a better visual version than the current News. The other one is catalog search which is not functioning now. This used to show the scanned versions of retail catalogs.

Google has not yet officially commented on Flipper. The product is now in an internal beta on a password protected server. Only if you login in to your Google account you can access the product.

It is a common guess that Google developed the product in conjugation with the high rated publishers. It seems the publishers lobbied so that they get a greater visual representation of their publications in Google News. These are publishers who feel that their brands have been diluted by mingling them with the usual blogs and nameless sources in Google News. The publishers assume that if the branded pages if projected separately will be noticed better there by get better response, since the brands are more trusted by the customers.

It is possible that there will be some small charges deducted for the service. It might be some find of a subscription charge. But the assumption is that the customers will be willing to spend a bit if they can view the publication brand or news sources of their choice.

It is possible that the service when launched will stay parallel to the Google News in use currently for some quite a period of time. Google has to experiment and introduce greater changes in the news because it has not been performing up to its potential. Yahoo news is the most viewed news at present.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The news display from Google News has had a great change in the overall view. It is not the same way it was seen to be arranged earlier. When you want to view any news clusters you can get to read the entire article which tells Full Coverage of articles, blogs, local sources, images, quotes and videos”.

You can easily click onto this link and find out more about this. You will have different classifications of the same news so that it enables you to chose the one from which you would like to take information from. Also they have to say:

“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.”

The sources can be attained from the right column where links are being introduced. In case of the videos, the news can be displayed online itself without any hindrance in any way.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The latest news talked about Google News Blogs which has started with Twitter which has the capability of posting the newest stories onto the links through Google news on Twitter. This is nothing new as there are plenty of other websites which keep posting stories to twitter also. The same thing has been followed by Google News lately to start posting stories. I do not have personal confirmations from any side; still I strongly feel that Google News also empowers @ News which is By Robots.

Twitter has had the greatest growth of all ages and people are just wondering about the magnificent achievement and how this was made possible. It is not a simple case as they have acquired all around popularity and people are switching onto Twitter due to several reasons like user-friendliness, protection, safety and lot of other features making it distinctive from the other websites. According to a study it has been noted that average users are getting into Twitter and they have tremendous opinion about this site.

It was in the month of February that Google started with Twitter and after that several official services from Google has started joining this great thing. There are many bigger companies having a complete list of search engines as well as the employees at Twitter and a recent finding states that @GoogleWebspam has been the latest one to enroll into Twitter. Presently, the activation of twitter has not been confirmed yet. Still, the same news has been confirmed on high priority basis by one of the member of Google Web Spam team.

People have started tweeting and it has lately become one of the revolutionary ways which has been initiated by people across the globe.

Popularity: 3% [?]

In March Google has launched Google Visualization API, this API helped anyone to build applications on top of Google Spreadsheets. They launched to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced visualization technology, and do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with new visualizations. Today Google has expanded their capabilities of the visualization API.

The Google Visualization API give you freedom to access many sources of structured data that you may display, by selecting from a large selection of visualizations. Using Google Visualization API you can expose your own data, stored anywhere in data-store if it is connected to the web, as a Visualization compliant data source. Thus you can create reports and dashboards as well as analyze and display your data through the wealth of available visualization applications.

And now today Google Expanded the capability of the Google Visualization API announced on the OficialGoogleBlog in the post Visualizing data in the cloud. What they said i had quoted below:

Today, we are expanding the capabilities of the Google Visualization API by enabling developers to display data from any data source connected to the web (any database, Excel spreadsheet, etc.), not just from Google Spreadsheets.

They also announced that Salesforce.com has worked on some tool to make Google Visualization API to use easily. Quoted below:

We’re also pleased to announce that Salesforce.com has made available some tools to make the Google Visualization API even easier to use. These tools enable their customers to build sophisticated reporting and analysis applications using the API that works with data inside Salesforce.com’s CRM.

Now these tools will help users that now they generate reports and dashboards quickly for their Salesforce CRM data. So, these things will help the users in the way by making their work easier.

We are dedicated to cover the Important Search Engine News from the Internet. In the SEO News category we cover all News related to the search engines as Google, yahoo, MSN, AOL, Altavista etc.

Popularity: 3% [?]