Compare Political Quotes

Google Labs added a new experimental service: In Quotes, which compares what different politicians say about popular issues like health care, taxes, environment. The service uses a feature from Google News that detects quotes in news articles and a public API that offers programmatic access to the quotes.

"These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted," informs the FAQ.

Automatically detecting quotes is not an easy task, so not all the quotes are correctly attributed. Google truncates long quotes because they're treated the same as search results snippets.

For now, Google selected a small number of political figures from the US, Canada, India and the UK, but it would be interesting to create a service that allows users to enter two or more names and then save the interesting quotes.

Google Digitizes Historical Newspapers

In its never-ending quest to organize the world's information, Google started to digitize old editions from newspapers like Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Today's News-Herald and make them available at Google News Archive.


"Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. This effort expands on the contributions of others who've already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006, we started working with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via Google News Archive," explains Google Blog.

The newspapers digitized by Google are available for free in an interface similar to the one from Google Book Search. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to read articles, even though Google automatically detects headlines and centers the associated content.

Google News Source Filtering

When you view a cluster in Google News, there's a new option to filter sources: you can restrict news articles to blogs and to local news sites that are relevant to your query. The filters are a good way to find opinionated articles and more up-to-date information from local sites.

Here's an example of cluster that groups articles about some new information regarding last week's Qantas Airways flight that was forced to make an emergency landing in Manila. Google shows three filters: blogs, Australia (Qantas is the national airline of Australia) and Manila, Philippines.

There's also a search box that is supposed to let you find articles from the cluster, but it doesn't work properly right now.

The Unlikely Integration Between Google News and Digg

TechCrunch reiterates the rumor that Google is about to acquire Digg. "The two companies have reportedly signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source." While I don't find too many reasons why Google would buy Digg, it's clear that Digg and Google News don't have almost anything in common.

Google hand-picked more than 4500 sources and used them to cluster news articles. The idea behind Google News was to display different perspectives on the same subject and to rank them algorithmically. Even the homepage is generated automatically, based on the editorial decisions of the publication included in Google News. Last year, when Google News added comments, the feature surprised many people: the comments could only come from "people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question".

Digg gets the stories from users, who have to manually submit each item. To be promoted on the homepage, a story has to be voted by a sufficient number of users, who can also post comments. "Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you," explains the site. Launched as an alternative to Slashdot, Digg expanded from technology news to general news.

To integrate Google News with Digg, Google would have to radically change its news site and this is unlikely. Besides, Google News could easily add a voting system and user comments like in the recent Google search experiment, without needing a site like Digg. If Google does acquire Digg, I think it's for mining a big amount of votes and detecting patterns that could be used to improve features like "edit search results". Digg is also a good platform for experimenting with filtering information, news recommendations and could be helpful in Google's new social quests.

Google News Tests New Design

Google News experiments with a lively and visually-rich design that shows images, videos, quotes, but also interesting and popular stories. There's a "featured photo" section that uses images from AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters, marking the first time when Google News promotes stories just because it has the permission to show associated images.

If you are logged in, the new interface personalizes all the sections, not just the front page, and you can switch to the non-personalized version to see the differences.

The homepage shows a list of "developing stories".

The Sci-Tech section, with more photos.

Front-page sections can be minimized and look like iGoogle gadgets.

Google News clusters prominently display the main title.

The footer is more lighthearted. "All the news that's fit to crawl. Auto-generated from over 4500 news sources, void where prohibited."

In June, Google News blog announced the new UI, without getting into details. "Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism."

{ Thnaks, Santosh. }

Google News Layer for Google Earth

There's a new layer for Google Earth that shows Google News stories related to a location. At the recent "Factory Tour of Search" event, Google explained the difficulties of automatically identifying the locations of a news story. For example, just because a news article includes "Paris" doesn't mean that the article talks about France's capital. It could be about the Texas city or Paris Hilton, so the algorithm needs to disambiguate names, identify complete addresses and determine the importance of an alleged location in a text. Google News also uses its automatically-generated clusters to validate locations and their importance to a news story.

"The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest," says Brandon Badger, Product Manager of Google's Geo team.

To enable the Google Earth layer, go to the Layers sidebar, expand "Gallery" and select "Google News" from the impressive list of overlays. Another news-related layer that has been recently added to Google Earth is for New York Times, but it's likely that the news are geo-coded manually.


If you want to read news related to a location in your browser, add a local section to the personalized Google News homepage. "Adding a Local News section allows you to track news stories from and about a particular city or region. While this function is currently only available in our English language editions, we hope to add more languages and regions in the near future," explains the Google News help center.

Google News Quote Finder

Google News can now detect quotes in news articles and attribute them to their authors. If you search for people like Eric Schmidt, Pope Benedict XVI, President Bush, Angela Merkel or Fernando Alonso, Google News will display a relevant quote and a link to other quotes from recent news articles.


You can search inside the quotes, sort them by date, restrict them to the last day or the last week. Unfortunately the links to quote listings aren't very descriptive (here's one example) and there's no option to find the quotes related to a news cluster. By default, Google sorts the quotes by relevance and gives more weight to the quotes that are used often.


{ via Google News Blog }