Product Code Database
Google News is a News aggregator developed by Google Search. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines.
Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and Web application. Google released a beta version in September 2002 and the official app in January 2006.Krishna Bharat, "And now, News" , The Official Google Blog, January 23, 2006. Accessed June 19, 2008. The initial idea was developed by Krishna Bharat.
The service has been described as the world's largest news aggregator. In 2020, Google announced they would be spending billion to work with publishers to create Showcases, "a new format for insightful feature stories".
The service covers news articles appearing within the past 44 days on various news websites. In total, Google News aggregates content from more than 20,000 publishers. For the English language, it covers about 4,500 sites;As used to be reported by Google. See also Segev, Elad (2010). Google and the Digital Divide: The Biases of Online Knowledge, Oxford: Chandos Publishing. for other languages, fewer. Its front page provides roughly the first 200 characters of the article and a link to its larger content. Websites may or may not require a subscription; sites requiring a subscription are no longer noted in the article's description.
The "first click free" program, introduced in 2008, allowed users to find and read articles behind a paywall. The reader's first click to the content is free, and the number after that would be set by the content provider. On December 1, 2009, Google changed its policy to allow a limit of five articles per day, in order to protect publishers from abuse. This policy was again changed on September 29, 2015 where this limit was changed to three articles per day. In October 2017, this program was replaced with a "flexible sampling" model in which each publisher chooses how many, if any, free articles were allowed.
The layout of Google News underwent a major revision on May 16, 2011.
On July 14, 2011, Google introduced "Google News Badges", which it later retired in October 2012.
In June 2017, the desktop version of Google News saw a thorough redesign that according to Google had the goal to "make news more accessible and easier to navigate ... with a renewed focus on facts, diverse perspectives, and more control for users." Yet several options such as the search tools menu were removed along with the redesign, making searches much more difficult. It now uses a card format for grouping related news stories, and as summarized by Engadget, "doesn't look like a search results page anymore", removing text snippets and blue links.
Historically users could choose to hide articles originating from a news source. These hidden sources can still be listed in a user's settings however these exclusions are no longer honoured. The option to exclude a source of news items is no longer presented.
According to a 2020 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Google News prioritizes local news outlets when individuals search for keywords specifically related to topics of local interest.
On October 18, 2023 Google confirmed they cut at least 40 jobs in the news division. Google clarified that: "These internal changes have no impact on our misinformation and information quality work in News."
In 2007, a preliminary injunction and then a Belgian court ruled that Google did not have the right to display the lead paragraph from French-language Belgian news sources when Google aggregated news stories, The majority Dutch-language press is fully included in Google News nor to provide free access to cached copies of the full content ("in cache" feature), due to both copyright and database rights. Google responded by removing the publications both from Google News and the main Google web search. According to the 2009 Report on the outlook for copyright in the EU:
In May 2011 the ruling was upheld in appeal after Google reiterated most legal defences from the first grade plus some new ones, which the Court rejected based on the Infopaq ruling and others. In July 2011, Copiepress publications were restored on Google News after they requested so and renounced any complaint based on the judgement.
Nevertheless, in a 2017 briefing on the ancillary copyright for press publishers paid by the European Commission, Prof. Höppner thought the database right was not violated by most platforms on the basis that the "substantial part" criterion may be too high a bar after the 2002 decision in Fixtures Marketing v. OPAP and that no publisher was known to have won a case with it.
Lobbying by Europe-based news outlets goes back to at least the 2010s. In Germany, their lobbying led to the introduction of the ancillary copyright for press publishers in 2013. In October 2014, a group of German publishers granted Google a license to use snippets of their publications gratis; the group had first claimed that such snippets were illegal, and then complained when they were removed by Google. German Publishers Grant Google A 'Free License' Google Never Needed To Post News Snippets , TechDirt. In December 2014, Google announced it would be shutting down the Google News service in Spain. A new law in Spain, lobbied for by the Spanish newspaper publishers' association AEDE, required for news aggregators to pay news services for the right to use snippets of their stories on Google News. Google chose to shut down their service and remove all links to Spain-based news sites from international versions of the site. The Spanish version reopened in 2022, after Spain transposed the 2019 European Union copyright rule into national law, enabling media outlets to negotiate with tech companies rather than imposing a mandatory fee system.
In 2012, Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (AJN) jointly pulled out of allowing their content to be shown on Google News. The change resulted in only a "negligible" drop in traffic
In October 2020, Google announced a new program known as "Showcases", in which the company would pay publishers to curate featured news content displayed in branded panels on Google News and Discover. Showcases may occasionally include free access to paywalled content. The program was first launched in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The feature's launch in Australia came amid the implementation of the country's News Media Bargaining Code; Google stated that it believed the Showcase program was in compliance with the Code.
In response to the Online News Act, Google announced it would block all Canadian news sites from visitors located in Canada, when the act goes into effect near the end of 2023.
Users can request e-mail "alerts" on various keyword topics by subscribing to Google News Alerts. E-mails are sent to subscribers whenever news articles matching their requests come online. Alerts are also available via RSS and Atom feeds.
Users used to be able to customize the displayed sections, their location on the page, and how many stories are visible with a JavaScript-based drag and drop interface. However, for the US site, this has been disabled in favor of a new layout; roll-out of this layout is planned for other locales in the near future. Stories from different editions of Google News can be combined to form one personalized page, with the options stored in a HTTP cookie. The service has been integrated with Google Search History since November 2005. Upon its graduation from beta, a section was added that displays recommended news based on the user's Google News search history and the articles the user has clicked on (if the user has signed up for Search History).
A revamped version of Google News was introduced in May 2018 that included artificial intelligence features to help users find relevant information.
An expansion of the service was announced on September 8, 2008, when Google News began to offer indexed content from scanned newspapers. The depth of chronological coverage varies; beginning in 2008, the entire content of the New York Times back to its founding in 1851 has been available.
In early 2010, Google removed direct access to the archive search from the main Google News page, advanced news search page and default search results pages. These pages indicated that the search covered "Any time", but did not include the archive and only included recent news.
During the summer of 2010, Google decided to redesign the format of the Google news page. This redesign engendered significant complaints from regular users of the service.
In May 2011, Google cancelled plans to scan further old newspapers. About 60 million newspaper pages had been scanned prior to this event. Google announced that it would instead focus on "Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites".
In August 2011, the "News Archive Advanced Search" functionality was removed entirely, again generating complaints from regular users who found that the changes rendered the service unusable. Archival newspaper articles could still be accessed via the Google News Search page, but key functionalities such as the timeline view and ability to specify more than 10 results per page were removed.
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