Google News out-of-beta

Announcement
January 23, 2006

Today we are announcing that Google News is graduating from beta with a couple of shiny new features. When we introduced Google News in September, 2002 our goal was to enable readers to get a broader perspective and dig deeper into the news – perhaps reading ten articles on a topic instead of one.

To do this, we developed a service that delivered news in an entirely new way by presenting it in "clusters" that displayed related articles in a single group. In only a few years, Google News has grown to 22 regional editions in 10 languages.

In addition to taking Google News out of beta, we are also introducing personalized news headlines. By further integrating Personalized Search into Google News, users can now receive recommended news stories based on their past news searches and articles they’ve read, giving them suggestions for interesting stories to explore that they may not have discovered otherwise.

Users who want to receive personalized news headlines simply sign up for Personalized Search. Then, whenever they’re signed in to their Google Account, they’ll see recommended headlines based on what they’ve read in the past. These results appear along the left hand column but users can also get a full page of recommended stories by clicking on the section. All of this is done automatically using algorithms: for example, we might recommend news stories to you that many other users have read, especially when you and they have read similar stories in the past.

We have also added another new section to the left-hand column that shows the most popular recent stories in the Google News edition you are viewing. Now you can see the top stories being published by editors across the web, other stories popular with readers, and topics that you track or are interested in – all on one page.

Additional info about Google News is available at news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_google_news.html. Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, also published a related post to the Google Blog that you may find interesting at googleblog.blogspot.com.