Don Lewis Designs

Since its public launch in January 2006, Google News has been one of the most common ways that people access online news providers. The ability to use the automated news aggregator to see the most popular or the most recent stories is as useful to many online users as the ability to see how other online news providers are covering the same story.

One of Google News’s biggest features is something that would seem a little odd coming from anywhere but the company which proudly announces “this process is entirely automated; no humans are involved” on many of its product pages. Every aspect of what the end-user sees on Google News (outside of the initial page design) is entirely automated, with no human action involved in altering the front page or deciding which stories get the most visibility on the site.

This algorithmic approach to editorial selection is based upon the ‘StoryRank’ concept – a spin off of Google’s founding PageRank formula. Created relatively early in the company’s history by principal research scientist Krishna Bharat, it was first devised in 2001 in the aftermath of the 911 attacks to keep Bharat abreast of related developments.

Although it would be years until the service moved from the beta release of March 2002, Google News is particularly significant to the company as one of its first endeavours outside of plain text Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Today the service is available in different versions optimised for 19 different languages and across 40 different geographical regions and in 2010, Hitwise reported that it delivered 17.32% of all upstream traffic to online news providers in the US.

The key to understanding how Google News works is very similar to understanding the basic principle behind its Search technology; relevancy. Applying this concept to ‘News’ – to current events and developments – its clear to see why Google sets certain limits on its aggregator. Only articles that have been crawled in the past 30 days appear in Google News and to a great extent, websites (or ‘publishers’) with the highest PageRank will get greater visibility in News results than others.

One area of controversy that remains with Google News – aside from the ongoing debate regarding paid content and lost advertising revenues – is how the company selects which sources its software will draw stories from. Whilst the selection of stories is entirely automatic, the selection of online news providers still requires some human oversight.

This is largely due to an incident in March 2005 when the still-in-beta product was criticised for including material from the white supremacist magazine National Vanguard. Still, inclusion in Google News is largely automated; publishers simply submit a form to Google detailing their .xml feeds or the sitemaps for their news content. However unlike story selection, Google reserves the power to screen news sources if their inclusion would be problematic