News Blog

Google is extracting quotations for politicians and celebrities from news sources and featuring them at the top of the Google News results page for certain searches.

For instance, a search on "Barack Obama" brings up a quotation by the Democratic presidential hopeful, and clicking on his name under the quote takes you to more pages of his quotations. You can then search within just the quotations from there.

"As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse," the Google News blog says. "You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor, or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics."

I could find quotations for Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, President Bush, and Vladimir Putin, but not for Bill Clinton or some major actors. As for sports stars, this is what Tiger Woods had to say: "I learned my lesson there with the press. I'm not going to say anything."

The latest Google conspiracy has the lava-loving Googlers removing from Google News articles critical of the United Nations. Does Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt have a back channel to the U.N.?

I don't think so. It seems a news site called Inner City Press was delisted from Google News for about a week leading the site to speculate that the move was due to its articles exposing alleged corruption at the U.N. But a Google spokesman says it was because the company was under the impression that there was just one man working at the news site.

To get stories on Google News, news sites have to have more than one staff member. Otherwise articles from the site are displayed on Google Blog search instead, says Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. That's the case with John Battelle who writes the Search Blog, Stricker added.

Google delisted Inner City News from Google News beginning February 13 following a "user complaint," Stricker said. After Inner City News provided evidence of more than one staffer Google began re-listing the site's articles on Tuesday, he said.

Now, back to the news.

Google is combining YouTube videos with Google News to offer users what it hopes will be greater perspective on news stories.

The company announced on its blog that visitors to Google News will see a "Video" prefix next to news stories. Clicking on these links will take them to a YouTube page where they can watch video about the subject.

Google is still testing the offering with news sources such as CBS, Reuters and local TV stations owned by Hearst.

"Today, viewing news videos or other content types on the Web can be a frustrating experience," said Lucy Zhang, a member of Google News' engineering team. "You often get videos that don't play, sites that require different video player downloads, or have misleading descriptions of the content. That's why we're working with YouTube so you can easily view online videos without any downloads required and regardless of what browser you're using."

The offering is a sign that Google is looking for ways to get the most use out of YouTube's vast video library. The service may also send a message to news providers that Google is ratcheting up efforts to become the Web's main news stand.

For anyone who's ever been quoted in a newspaper, you've likely read over the article with great anticipation only to conclude that the reporter completely missed the mark, or at least neglected something you feel is important to your story. It's human nature. Unfortunately, there isn't much you or the news agency can do to clarify and remedy the miscommunication. Sure, newspapers can, and do, print corrections, but only when there is a factual error in the story, and they hardly rectify the situation. While not a perfect solution, the folks at Google News have recently begun soliciting comments from participants and subjects covered by the news report.

... Read more

Google News is getting an interesting feature this week, and by interesting I mean it's downright peculiar. Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they're somehow involved in it. The process is not for everyone, and in fact requires a lengthy verification process of sending off your comment and credentials to a special Google e-mail address, and later verifying your identity via domain name and an e-mail follow-up from Google staff. If you pass the test, your comment will show up alongside the article.

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has spotted two examples (1, 2) of these comments in the wild. They show up underneath the story description with the person's real name and title.

Will this work? Yahoo tried out a somewhat similar feature with forums dedicated to each story, but shut it down late last year when the amount of spam and off-topic conversation became overwhelming. There were plans to bring it back earlier this year, but the feature remains defunct. Google's approach is almost entirely on the other side of the spectrum, keeping comments tied down to experts.

My only questions are who on Google's end will be doing moderation, whether or not they're capable of those editorial decisions, and if they'll be able to handle the onslaught of incoming e-mail. I also question if going to Google first instead of the story's source for things like corrections or comments is really the best way to add context to a story. While Google may be linking to the content, keeping the system too closed might keep the real story from coming out.

I got to enjoy Matt Cutts live and in person on Saturday speaking to the WordPress bloggers and fans at WordCamp 2007. Matt was in top form, witty as ever. The session was blogged by numerous folks. The sessions were all recorded, so, we hope, we should see a video of Matt's session surface online pretty soon. Matt said he'd probably be posting his Powerpoint to his blog, assuming he gets approval from Google's PR department.

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That's great news, because it historically hasn't been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn't recommend targeting "iphone_review" as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.

So it used to be--until now--that any benefit that you would have gotten by having a keyword-rich URL was negated by the use of underscores separating those words. TypePad and Movable Type blogs were particularly affected by this, as by default, underscores were used instead of hyphens. This new change in the Google algorithm should make bloggers using the TypePad service or the Movable Type blog software (and anyone else using underscores in their URLs) very happy, as I anticipate their Google traffic will be going up.

A few other highlights from Matt's talk that you may find interesting:

• Matt claims that Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! Put another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL.
• Matt stated that the number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. He went on to say that although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Matt addressed this because I specifically asked the question from the audience.
• According to Matt, the file extension in your URL won't affect your rankings. So it's inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe.
• Matt stated it was myth that Google uses its status as a domain registrar to access domain registration data to use it as a ranking signal. According to Matt, being a registrar doesn't grant one special access to other registrars' customer data. Note that Matt didn't state whether Google is or isn't using WHOIS data as a signal. I believe they are.
• When asked about how to get one's blog into Google News, Matt shared one of Google's requirements for inclusion: the blog must have multiple authors. So those of you wanting your blog showing up in Google News results, I hope it's a group blog!

I was flattered that Matt Cutts gave me props twice in his presentation: first by recommending my WordPress plugin SEO Title Tag, and second by listing my blog optimization series as recommended reading. Matt even called me out in the audience. Thanks Matt! :-)

Google has added links to Belgian newspapers back into its main Web search site after beginning talks with a group that had filed a copyright lawsuit over Google's practice of linking to French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.

The group, Copiepresse, sued Google more than a year ago alleging that the search giant's use of headlines and snippets of Belgian newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service, and its practice of providing links to cached copies of the articles in its main Web search results, violated copyright. A Belgian court sided with Copiepresse last September, ordering Google to remove the links. The case was reheard and the court in February reaffirmed its earlier ruling but reduced the daily fine Google faces if it fails to heed the order. Late last year, Google settled with Belgian journalists and photographers, but not with Copiepresse, which represents the newspaper publishers.

In a joint statement, Google and Copiepresse said: "Internet users interested in Belgian news and users of Google's search engine may have noticed today that the websites of the Belgian French and German-language daily newspapers, members of Copiepresse, are again referenced on the search engine. This decision was made jointly by Google Inc. and Copiepresse as part of the constructive dialogue that has resumed between the two organizations. The websites of the Belgian French and German-language daily press will now appear without a 'cached' link in the search results of Google's search engine, thanks to their use of the 'noarchive' tag (a tool publishers can use to control how their Web site is referenced on the Web). The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term."

Search engine expert Danny Sullivan wrote on his Search Engine Land blog that "the change means that the Belgian papers will now again begin receiving traffic from Google, something which they lost after suing to get out of Google News. That lawsuit resulted in them being taken not just out of Google News but Google entirely. The traffic drop had to have been painful. A new report from Hitwise shows that at least for the U.S., newspapers get 25 percent of their traffic from search engines."

The Belgian group isn't the first to cry foul over Google's use of news content. Last month, Paris-based news agency Agence France Press reached a licensing agreement to settle its copyright lawsuit against Google that allows Google to post AFP content, including news stories and photographs, on Google News, as well as on other Google services. Last August, Google announced a similar agreement with the Associated Press that allows it to use AP news and photos not in Google News, but in some new service that is under development.