Google News

From ArticleWorld


Google News is a popular news aggregating service offered by Google. Like many other Google services, Google News was in beta for several years, starting from April 2002, and took its final shape in January 2006.

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Features

The service itself is very powerful and popular. Several languages are available (more than 20 at the time of writing) and fully human-selected sources. In order to allow a fluent flow of information, the service itself is completely automatic, although the sources are human selected.

Google News covers news articles over a 30-day period, from several sources, in any of the selected languages. Many sources are available (almost 5,000 for the English language). The usual method of displaying information is to provide the first approx. 200 characters and a link to the complete article.

Google News provides a complete search engine possibility that allows articles to be indexed by date and time of publishing, as well as grouping them by various criteria. It also provides e-mail, RSS and Atom alerts.

The page can be fully customized by each user, allowing settings to be stored in a cookie. The sections and their location can be easily customized through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

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Criticism

Despite the service's great popularity, it has been subject to some criticism in time. The first serious problem Google News faced was that of the source selection: in March 2004, Google decided not to include sources censored by the communist regime in China to Chinese users. The problem bounced back in 2005, when Google included the National Vanguard magazine, a white supremacist magazine.

Google Inc. was also involved in a trial with Agence France Presse. The French news agency claimed that Google infringed AFP copyright by including photos and headlines without permission. As a consequence, Google News no longer provides AFP news.

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