WebProNews

Google Further Customizes the News Experience

Google has launched a new Google News feature called the Custom Sections Directory. This is a page where users can go to find and create customized sections covering narrower topics to put on their Google News homepages or share with other users.

UK News Sites Getting Big Traffic from US

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

Kanye, Swayze, Others Propel Google News to Record Week in UK

Google News had a record week in the UK last week. Hitwise attributes this largely to a big week for celebrity news.

Google Trying to Differentiate Between Blogs and News?

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I'm not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I'm talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names. You can see a few examples here:

Google Acquires CAPTCHA Company

Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web. Perhaps you're thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

Google Fast Flip vs. the Blogosphere

For being nothing more than a "labs" project for Google, Fast Flip has received an overwhelming amount of attention as well as criticism. In case you have been under a rock, Fast Flip is a lab Google launched, that has been talked about before under its codename, "Flipper."

Google Adding Some Visual Flare to News?

Update: Google's Marissa Mayer has now announced the product officially, and named it Google Fast Flip. Original Article: Google is reportedly launching a new lab in Google Labs called Flipper, which takes Google News to a much more visual place, by showing news stories as thumbnails of the actual pages they reside on.

Google News SEO Tips - Ranking in News Search

I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.

Google News Italia Probe Expands

Google received a piece of bad news - and perhaps a laugh - today as we prepare to go into the long weekend.  Here's the serious part: Italian antitrust regulators have decided to expand the focus of an investigation from the Italian version of Google News to the entire corporation.

Google Expands Reach of Arabic Google News

Google launched four new Arabic versions of Google News for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. According to Google, there are over 40 million Arabic-speaking Internet users, so you might say these versions of Google News are long overdue.