Chapter 3. News and Blogs
The Internet is a worldwide conversation, and nowhere is that better reflected than in the flow of news coverage by “official” news sources and bloggers alike, as well as in the tangled discussions of Usenet news and mailing lists. Google trawls through our conversations, threads them together, tidies them up (just a tad), and reflects them back at us in Google News, Google Blog Search, and Google Groups. Google also gives anyone the opportunity to take part in the worldwide conversation with its free blog tool Blogger.
Google News
At the time of this writing, Google News (http://news.google.com) culls over 4,500 news sources—from the Scotsman to the China Daily, from the New York Times to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The front page, shown in Figure 3-1, is updated algorithmically without any involvement by puny humans—aside, of course, from those writing the news in the first place—several times a day. The “most relevant news” rises to the top.
Figure 3-1. The Google News front page
Stories are organized into clusters, drawing together coverage and photographs from various news sources around the Web. Click the “all n related” link for a list of all stories falling within that cluster. Click “sort by date” to see how the story unfolded across sources over time.
All of this doesn’t apply just to the front page, but to all the newspaper-like sections ...
Get Google Hacks, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
