Google News is an automated news aggregator that collects headlines from over 4,500 English language news sources globally, covering news articles that have appeared within the past 30 days. Related stories are grouped together and displayed based on the user’s personal interests. This offers users a variety of perspectives from which to choose and more personalized options. With links provided to several articles on every story, users can decide on which publishers’ version of the story to read.

Google uses algorithms to select and rank stories. They evaluate where and how often a story appears online and also rank based on characteristics such as relevance, freshness, location and diversity. Without human influence, the stories are provided without regard to ideology or political viewpoint and a wide variety of perspectives are offered.

Google News pages can be personalized to display the stories of interest. Users can sign up for daily, weekly or as-it-happens email alerts on any topic as well. With a mobile data plan, a special version of Google News may be accessed from a mobile phone. By subscribing to RSS or Atom feeds, updates can be received. There is now an archive search available where users can explore historical archives from the past 200 years.

As of July, 2008, Google News is available in 19 languages in more than 40 regions.

Categories: Glossary
Tags: alerts, Google alerts, google news, rss