Google News unquestionably dominates the news search engine landscape. We refer to a plethora of news search engines because there is, in fact, a separate news search engine for each language that Google indexes. While it’s true that Google News is available in more than 40 different languages, there aren’t quite as many as the company claims. It would appear that the several English-language publications are really just different takes on the same news index. The layout of their respective homepages is what sets them apart. Homepages for individual countries in a given area feature prominent displays of news from that country and the region.
During a search, regionally relevant sources are prioritised, meaning that such results will rank higher in the list of hits and be given a higher relevance score. Google’s English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, as well as Google India’s English-language edition, all return nearly the same number of results for a given search query. However, the order in which those results appear varies by country, as the relevance algorithm is tweaked for each. The mechanism through which this operates is kept secret. The same holds true for translations from other languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, or French.
The clustering technique at Google News’s heart is essential to the auto-generated start pages of the various editions of the news search engine. Through the use of this technology, we are able to give each edition a distinct look that is tailored to that specific location. The usefulness of clustering is enhanced by the fact that it operates in the SERPs as well. It’s helpful since the same piece will often be republished on many newspaper websites, giving you a bird’s-eye view of news events rather than individual articles. This is due to the fact that many news sites rely only on content provided by news agencies for their worldwide and sometimes even national news, meaning that the same item will show many times inside a single results list in search engines that do not employ clustering.
The results lists from news search engines that don’t employ clustering will likely contain numerous headlines that are similar to each other. Of course, there will be minor variances because certain elements are periodically cut out, due to space limits. It should be noted that unlike Yahoo! News, Bing News does employ story grouping. By selecting ‘Headlines’ in the sidebar on the left, you may hide all the photos from the articles. On the other side, selecting “Images” will bring up only those pictures. Just hit the “All News” button to get everything back to normal. Just to the right, you’ll see a link that reads “Google Fast Flip;” clicking that will take you to Google Labs’ fast-flipping test version of Google News.
If you have made use of the numerous customization options that Google News provides, you can easily go back to the default look by clicking the link labelled “Standard Edition” at the page’s footer. Fast Flip offers a more visual interface, with stories shown as screenshots of the webpages from which Google News has pulled the content. The headlines, presented in blue language, are displayed beneath the images. If you click the big blue arrow to the right of the previews, you may quickly skim or flip between the tales. Each time the arrow is clicked, a new set of visuals related to the tale is displayed. The images in Fast Flip are attractive to the eye, and if you see something that catches your eye, you may expand it by clicking on it. You can also access the source page by selecting the “Read complete story” link.
If you enjoy Fast Flip, you can find a version of it with more flexible customization options on Google Labs. We’ll now examine the ‘Advanced news search’ box (see link at the top of the page), which offers some exciting options for customising your search. In the upper section labelled “Find results,” you’ll see four search boxes designed to make it simpler to use some elementary search logic. If you want your search results to include just articles that contain all of the terms you entered, choose the first option, “with all of the words.” Simply type the term you wish to locate in the story texts into the next box. Finally, in the third box, labelled “with at least one of the words,” you may provide a list of terms, any one of which must be in the returned results.
The fourth option lets you filter out unwanted terms from the search. The last option is a potent filter that may help eliminate irrelevant results, but it should be used with care. It works best when numerous results contain the words you want, but in an unexpected context or with a different meaning of one of your search phrases. In such instance, you should remove that term from your search and replace it with one that more frequently appears in the target articles.
