Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager, Google News

When a story breaks, Google News is designed to give you the most relevant articles from a variety of sources — from national news outlets, to local points of view, to expert opinion pieces. To continue to expand your views on the news, we are adding three new features for those using our US edition: larger images on our main page; a new realtime coverage page to surface the latest articles and commentary; and relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective.

Get coverage in real time
Our new realtime coverage page is now available for every news story as soon as they become available to Google News. 

See relevant comments on top stories
Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

If you’d like to try these new Google+ features in News, it’s easy to upgrade here.  That said, if you prefer your Google News to contain just news stories and no Google+ posts, you can either log out of Google or turn off the display of Google+ posts via the Google News settings page.  

We’re rolling out all of these features over the next week, so don’t worry if you don’t see them immediately. Today’s updates are the latest examples of how we’re working to provide users with a beautiful, consistent experience across Google. So we hope you enjoy them.

1: Accessibility and mobility — remote access, teleworking, virtual office, environmentally friendly
2: Maintenance — vendor handles updates. Employees not interrupted by IT upgrades, more productivity
3: Data recovery — automatically back up your data in mulitple locations, easy data recovery, avoid disasters
4: Security. You wouldn’t leave your money just sitting on your desk so why leave valuable business  data sitting in your unprotected computer?
5: Minimal IT staff. ArtQuest, a non-profit working with the arts, supports hundreds of staff with just one IT employee.
6: Costs. No capital expenditures on servers, no making space for hardware, no higher utilities for extra air conditioning and cooling. You can plan for established subscription fees rather than getting surprised by a server suddenly needing replacement.
7: Flexibility. Easy to change the number of users/accounts, add office locations quickly, and pay monthly not annually.

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous — they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:



Publishers get paid for hosting surveys. A number of publishers, such as the The Texas Tribune, the Star Tribune and Adweek have already started running these microsurveys on their sites.

So what’s the point of these questions? From international brands to local food trucks, every business owner wants to make important decisions with their customers’ feedback in mind. That’s why we’ve created Google Consumer Surveys, a new business-facing product that makes custom market research easy. It enables companies to ask questions (the ones you’ll later see on your screen) and get back quantitative results quickly, accurately and cost-effectively. Companies have already been using it to research everything from online shopping behavior (Lucky Brand Jeans) to gluten-free baking mixes (King Arthur Flour), and to assess brand awareness (Timbuk2) and inform product development (479 Popcorn). Google shares the money these companies spend with our publisher partners.

The idea behind Google Consumer Surveys is to create a model that benefits everyone. You get to keep enjoying your favorite online content, publishers have an additional option for making money from that content, and businesses have a new way of finding out what their customers want.

If you’re a publisher interested in running microsurveys on your site, let us know.

Students search online for everything—even when they know other sources might be more trustworthy

These days, college students who need an apartment head straight to Google or another search engine. Even sites such as apartments.com or apartmentguide.com are becoming an afterthought to this demographic.

According to a survey conducted between December 2011, and February 15, 2012, by residential and student marketing agency Catalyst, 53% of college students surveyed ranked search engines as the most important source in helping them find a place to live. They pointed to friends’ and parents’ recommendations as second- and third-most important, at 37% and 27%, respectively. Google was not just students’ top resource for apartments; 98% listed Google Search as the place they seek any information online.

Indeed, another recent study showed that when doing research for coursework, college students first went to Google or another search engine. An ebrary study indicated that in 2011, 85% of college attendees worldwide turned to Google to gather information for class assignments, up from 81% who did so in 2008. A somewhat smaller percentage of college students (79%) used print books for this purpose.

It’s no wonder that college students are heavy users of search engines. eMarketer estimates that nearly 83% of all US internet users will use a search engine at least once a month during 2012, and a Pew Internet & American Life Project study found in May 2011 that younger and better-educated US internet users used search engines the most.

While the popularity of Google is undisputed, one surprising element of the ebrary report is that, in 2011, students worldwide chose Google as a resource over printed books, even though they said that they viewed print as more trustworthy than any electronic resource. This was also the case in 2008.

“Students know that electronic information is transient and easy to produce compared to the product and processes of print publication,” the ebrary report said. “The barriers to print publication afford an intuitive impression of higher integrity.”

For search marketers, however, this means they can count on college students turning to Google and similar sites for the widest range of purposes, from lifestyle decisions to academic research.

Posted by Mariko Suzuki, Google News Strategist

Do you have any feedback or suggestions you would like to share with the Google News Team? We always love to hear from you, so we made submitting feedback much easier.

Simply click the “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of Google News pages. The Google Feedback gadget will appear, and you can leave us general comments, problem reports or feature suggestions. The feedback gadget will also help you send us a screenshot if you want to draw our attention to a specific aspect of the site. Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.

Although we won’t be able to reply to your comments individually, your feedback will help us create a better Google News experience. This tool will be launching worldwide, beginning with the U.S. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Incoming search terms:

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Who just endorsed whom? What do the latest polls say? How much money did they raise this quarter? Keeping up with the 2012 elections in the U.S. and staying abreast of breaking developments can be quite a task in today’s fast-paced news cycle.

So today, we’re excited to continue our tradition of supporting you during elections season. Google News is launching an Elections section on its homepage which will organize and present elections coverage as it grows through the general election — Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

The Elections section will be visible by default for all US users and will be located beneath the Health section. It will bring readers the latest and most relevant news stories, using all of the ranking intelligence that users have come to expect of Google. You should also check out Google’s official elections page, YouTube’s collection of candidate videos, and the elections Trends Dashboard to find out more about how people are interacting with the elections online.

Posted by Erich Schmidt, Software Engineer

Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying — until now.

Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.

Here’s what Spotlight looks like with social annotations:

We hope this change helps you find more great articles to enjoy, and gives more power to your +1s.

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

Great journalism takes more than facts and figures — it takes skilled reporters to knit together compelling stories. Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article’s context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them. Whole communities can form around prominent contributors, which is why we started showing information about content creators next to their material in Google Search.

Accordingly, Google News is rolling out more information about journalists over the next several weeks, starting with English-language editions. When reporters link their Google profile with their articles, Google News now shows the writer’s name and how many Google+ users have that person in their circles. For the lead article for each story, Google News also shows that reporter’s profile picture and enables readers to add them to their Google+ circles right from the Google News homepage.

When a big story breaks, there are often over a thousand articles written about the news event. At Google News, we work hard to surface the most relevant and interesting content to you — so you can spend less time sorting through thousands of articles, and more time consuming news from a range of diverse perspectives.

For instance, since introducing expandable stories, we have added additional labels to call out special types of articles in many editions. These labels are designed to highlight different content types on Google News, and show you stories that complement and expand upon standard news reporting. The four labels we recently launched include:

• Live Updating: A live-updating article, such as a liveblog.
• Featured: An article a publisher has told us is standout.
• Fact-check: An article providing fact-check content about the story.
• Your Preferred source: An article from a source that you preferred.

Evaluating a story from different angles often provides a sharper perspective. That is why we also now highlight special types of articles in many Google News search results. Your search results will not only show recent articles, but also those from diverse perspectives that relate to a given query.

We also recently added the Translate button to non-English international stories in expandable story boxes in the U.S edition, giving you the ability to read pieces from all over the world — even if you don’t speak the language.

 

We hope you find these changes useful as we continue to develop opportunities for you to find more interesting and valuable content.

Halloween is almost here and we’re celebrating early. No trick — just a treat. As of now, you can access Google News in the Google Dashboard. This gives you the ability to see basic information about your Google News personalizations, check out our privacy policy and click through to edit your preferences.