An Innovative Approach to News

Extra! Extra! Read all about it. If you are an Internet news hound and you like your flavour local – Google’s new site is for you!

The site stands out from other news compilation sites like the ones at Yahoo! News or the Wall Street Journal in that it does not depend on an editorial staff to organise the headlines – it gets computer programs to do it!

Not only is Google News, a great aggregation of worldwide news, which can be seen in summary form, and is searchable, now it is being specifically developed for the Australian market.

Where and how does Google get so much news?

Google News selects information and culls it from approximately 4,500 news sources throughout the world and then automatically arranges them to present the most relevant news first. News Topics are updated continuously throughout the day, so new stories should appear each time the site is visited.

Google has also developed an automated grouping process for their News site that pulls together related headlines and photos from thousands of sources worldwide. It then allows the reader to see how different news organisations are reporting the same story. The reader can then pick the item that interests them and go directly to the site that initially published the news article in the first instance.

Doesn’t this take a lot of people and effort?

What is highly unusual about Google News is that it offers a news service compiled entirely by computers without any human intervention at all. The headlines that appear 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.

Occasionally this can lead to some curious and contradictory groupings, it is exactly this variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information on the important subject matter of the day.

Another interesting capacity is the ability to trace the history of a developing story by clicking the "sort by date" function on the page containing all reports on a given topic. Doing so causes the stories to then be arranged in chronological order, with the most recent report placed first.

That’s a lot of information, what about local content?

If you'd like to see more news about your own country and a lot less about sports not played in this hemisphere you are catered for as well.

Google News is offered in several versions tailored to different national audiences. If the version you're seeing doesn't have the right focus for you, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the country from the list there that interests you.

Google News Australia, based on the same comprehensive search service that millions of users worldwide access each day for current information, displays news headlines and photos specific to Australia more prominently. For example, Google News Australia will have more links to stories about Australian businesses, politics, celebrities and sport, while still providing Australian users with up-to-the-minute news headlines and related photos from around the world.

Australia
Canada
India
New Zealand
United Kingdom

How far back does Google News go?

Google News includes articles that have appeared within the last 30 days.

In basic how does the computer manage this?

Under the covers is clustering software developed at Google. Clustering is a statistical technique for rapid comparison of documents.

You can think of clustering as a way to build a line in an imaginary space out of each document. Then you measure the angle between the “lines” to get a measure of how similar documents are.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au