May 08, 2018
[[read-time]] min read
Trystan Upstill
Distinguished Engineer, Google News Engineering and Product Lead
In the nearly 30 years since the world wide web launched, more than 2 billion websites have been created. It can feel impossible to keep up with the hundreds of thousands of tweets, tens of thousands of pages, and hundreds of hours of video that come online every single minute.
Amid this deluge of information, important new voices are constantly emerging. There’s more diverse content to discover and more great journalism being produced than ever before. In order to make it easier to keep up and make sense of it all, weset out to bring our news products into one unified experience.
Today we’re rolling out an all new Google News, which uses the best of artificial intelligence to find the best of human intelligence—the great reporting done by journalists around the globe.
Using real-time AI/ML to organize the news
When we created the original Google News 15 years ago, we simply organized news articles to make it easier to see a range of sources on the same topic.
The reimagined Google News uses a new set of AI techniques to take a constant flow of information as it hits the web, analyze it in real time and organize it into storylines. This approach means Google News understands the people, places and things involved in a story as it evolves, and connects how they relate to one another. At its core, this technology lets us synthesize information and put it together in a way that helps you make sense of what’s happening, and what the impact or reaction has been.
A news experience that keeps you fully informed
For many of us, news comes from dozens of different places—sports from a favorite website, politics from TV, and news about your community from your local paper.
When you’re in the app, “For You” makes it easy to stay up to date on everything you care about all in one place. We start with a briefing of five stories that Google News has organized for you—a mix of the most important headlines, local news and the latest developments on the topics you’re interested in.
And the more you use the app, the better the app gets. We’ve also built easy-to-use and easy-to-access controls so you can decide if you want to see more or less of a topic or publisher.
As we built the app, we focused on letting the stories speak for themselves with great images and videos from YouTube and across the web. To help you quickly get you up to speed, we’re experimenting with a unique visual format called newscasts. Here, the latest developments in natural language understanding bring together a collection of articles, videos and quotes on a single topic. Newscasts make it easy to dive right into perspectives to learn more about a story—plus, it’s easy to read on your phone.
Full Coverage: Understanding the full story
If you want to get a deeper insight into a story, the “Full Coverage” feature provides a complete picture of how that story is reported from a variety of sources. With just a tap you’ll see top headlines from different sources, videos, local news reports, FAQs, social commentary, and a timeline for stories that have played out over time.
Having a productive conversation or debate requires everyone to have access to the same information. That’s why content in Full Coverage is the same for everyone—it’s an unpersonalized view of events from a range of trusted news sources.
To find out what the world is reading, head over to Headlines for an unfiltered view of news from around the world. Additional sections let you dig into more on technology, business, sports, entertainment and others.
The best journalism from around the web
Of course Google News wouldn’t exist without the great journalism being created every day. The Newsstand tab makes it easy to find and follow the sources you trust, as well as browse and discover new ones. You can also access more than 1,000 magazine titles in a mobile-optimized reading format.
And if you want to support your favorite news sources, we’ve made it simple to subscribe with your Google account. This means no more forms, credit card numbers, or new passwords. And soon, thanks to the new Subscribe with Google platform (launched as a part of the Google News Initiative), you’ll get access to your paid content everywhere—on all platforms and devices, on Google News, Google Search, and on publishers’ own websites.
What’s next
The all-new Google News replaces Google Play Newsstand on mobile and desktop and the Google News & Weather app on mobile. It's rolling out starting today and will be available to everyone on Android, iOS and the web in 127 countries by next week.
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