This quote usually comes from a popular or recent article about the person that also appears in the Google News search results. The quote is automatically generated by a Google algorithm – not hand-picked. And as we know all too well, there are often flaws in algorithms.

This leads us to Ron Paul, and the unfortunate misquote that adorned his search results a couple weeks ago. Barry Schwartz pointed me to a Google News Help thread where one user had captured a result with a particularly racist misquote from the Presidential hopeful:

The outraged user commented:

This was never spoken by Ron Paul, and should not be displaying Inaccurate and Misleading racist quote to Millions of Google users. Can anyone post a news article with “questionable content” and then have Google use it to deface an individual just because of one authors prejudice? Please remove this, it has been showing for days, I would hope Paul himself would take legal action against Google for something of this nature.

There’s a good point in there. This kind of thing could be seen by millions and millions of Google users, especially if it was plastered at the top of the results for multiple days. Of course, Google didn’t do this on purpose to smear Ron Paul, but there’s no denying that this kind of accidental misquote displayed so prominently could really do damage to a public figure – especially a politician running for the highest office in the land.

This quote is no longer displayed when one searches for Ron Paul within Google News -

But it got me thinking. This Google News feature may have the problem of providing some serious confusion, misquoting, and out of context quoting on occasion. I mean right now, if you search Mitt Romney within Google News, you get this quote at the very top:

To be fair, that’s not a misquote – Romney did say that. But that quote has been at the center of a huge controversy within the Republican party and a focal point of attacks against the former Governor for the past week. The whole controversy centers on the fact that Romney supporters feel that quote was taken out of context. It’s kind of ironic to see it presented at the top of a Google search without any context.

Other, smaller problems can occur as well. Take for instance the confusion created when you search for Joe Biden within Google News:

That quote is cut off and therefore it is unclear who he is talking about. To a casual searcher who doesn’t quite grasp that section’s function, it might appear that it’s just saying that Joe Biden himself will “double down” on those policies.

Then again, sometimes the algorithm works splendidly:

As you probably already know, this little Google problem pales in comparison to the one facing another GOP hopeful.

It appears at the bottom of the page, as pictured:

The Google Feedback gadget appears when you click the link. “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,” says Google News strategist Mariko Suzuki. “Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.”

Suzuki notes that Google may not be able to reply to your comments individually, but that the feedback will help Google “create a better Google News experience”.

The feedback will launch globally, but it will be available first in the U.S.

Google News now features an Elections section on its homepage which, like all other Google News sections, will attempt to feature the most recent and important stories about the volatile political season.

In Google News’ standard homepage (non-personalized), the Elections section will appear just below the Health section, according to the Google News team.

The new Google News homepage section is just one of many ways Google is attempting to keep internet users in the know this year. The aforementioned Google Politics & Elections hub charts the hottest news surrounding the campaign, as well as search trends, mentions tracking, and specific subcategories for each candidate. The site is also a place to see recent election results, for instance Tuesday night’s Iowa Caucus results.

And remember, YouTube Politics still compiles all the best political videos, whether they be news, parodies, or user-submitted rants.

Apparently Google is pushing authorship markup so hard they are eliminating other ways for users to find content by author. They have eliminated the “author:” search operator in Google News, which allowed users to find article specific to one author. Now, it’s all about authorship markup, like Google has been pushing in its regular web search results. In a post in the Google Help Forums (via Search Engine Roundtable), a Googler, Erik S., commented:

The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.

Authorship markup is actually not only a way for authors to gain visibility in search, but a way for Google to gain visibility for its Google Profiles, which are essentially the center of the Google+ user experience. Google’s version of the Facebook Wall, if you will.

These are sprinkled all throughout search results now, and that includes on Google News.

Earlier this year, Google’s Othar Hansson said in a video, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

That was in early August.

If you’re not already implementing authorship markup, it might be a good time to start considering it. For more about it and how to use it, check out this set of articles.

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 it looks like:

It’s interesting just how big a role social media, and Google+ in particular is starting to play in Google search. That said, it’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long to see this kind of thing come to Google News. I’d expect greater integration in the future.

Google has been abundantly clear from the start that Google+ will be heavily integrated across its products. It’s that very fact that gives Google+ a legitimate shot at taking on Facebook for social identity.

Much like the “nofollow” tag, the “standout” tag belongs to the HTML rel category, and much like it suggests, it’s intended for the most pop-worthy content, although, there’s nothing to stop people from putting the rel=”standout” tag on all of their content. One would guess Google is prepared for standout tag spam, and the inclusion of the tag doesn’t guarantee first page status on Google News. According to the Google News blog, the tag exists as a suggestion:

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show [emphasis added] the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results.

The blog entry also suggests using the standout tag — which looks like this: — while linking to content being referenced as well as on your own:

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.

While that stanza contains a “we believe” in reference to trust-earning, it’s clear Google is relying on this trust when it comes to picking which content is actually standout worthy. If you run a content spam site, one that survived the Panda purge, and you’re making liberal use of the standout tag, it’s doubtful it will make much of a difference in how the content is perceived, especially as Google refines the weight it gives links containing the tag in question.

In what looks like an effort to proactively address standout tag spam, Google suggests news organization only use the tag once per day:

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

In other words, don’t spam with the standout tag, otherwise, we’ll ignore you; but please, use it when you’re linking to quality content.

Pretty simple, right?

With that in mind, how long will it be before we see the first “Standout Tag Spam on Google News” article? Before the end of the coming week? Once again, for those who may have missed it, the syntax for the standout tag is as follows:

link rel=”standout” href=”http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html”

Thoughts on the standout tag? Let us know in the comments.

“Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent,Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers,” says Google News Product Specialist David Smydra. “Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former user-agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot.”

“Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies,” says Smydra. “You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.”

As far as analytics, you’ll still be able to differentiate traffic from Google Search and traffic from Google News, Google says.

Sites using Google’s metered subscription model or the first click free model won’t have to make any changes, but sites that require registration, payment or login before reading the full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that’s shown on the page.

Google stresses that the change will not affect how it crawls your News sitemaps.

More info in the help center.

Today, Google announced this as a feature of Google News. “Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they’re interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites,” says Yogita Mehta, a software engineer with the Google News team.

The Editors’ Picks section appears in the right-hand column in Google News.

“An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content,” says Mehta. “Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors’ Picks will always be just that—picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. You can browse a set of publisher feeds that span national, specific and local interests—like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, the Guardian and The Root, among many others—via the side-to-side arrows next to each publisher’s logo. The feeds you see are chosen based on a variety of factors, including your news preferences. If you’re interested in using source preferences on Google News, Editors’ Picks helps you do that with the slider that appears just below the articles.”

News organizations can go to this help center for instructions on using this feature. Right now, it’s only available for the U.S. version of Google News. Publishers can set it up via RSS feeds, though they must meet Google’s guidelines discussed in the help center.

If a user reads more, they will earn a higher level badge. The scale is: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Ultimate. There are also badges for all kinds of different topics (like Harry Potter, Chicago White Sox, or US Elections). There are over 500 of them so far.

“This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges,” says Google News engineer Natasha Mohanty. “Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.”

Clearly Google is getting more social, with the release of Google+. As Google ties more of its products into its new social network, it will be interesting to see how it integrates Google News into it.

In the video at the top about the the badges, Google says, “You can share them across your social network if you want to find shared interests with friends or spark conversations around certain topics.”

Did you catch that “spark” in there. Google+ has a content discovery feature called “Sparks,” also aimed at “sparking conversations.” Perhaps a tie in here is in the cards.

To use the badges, you have to be signed in, and have web history enabled. The help center has more.

Google News users may also be interested to know that Science and Tech are now separate sections.

“In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the ‘News for you’ and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.”

Google News has over 50,000 sources.

But that’s not all. Google outlines the new features in a blog post:

• Click-to-expand: Each story cluster is collapsed down to one headline with the exception of the top story. When something grabs you, click nearby anywhere but the title to expand the story box.
• Labeled diversity: For stories you’ve expanded, you’ll see genre labels for some of the additional articles that explain why they were chosen and how they add value. For example, you might see something labeled as an “Opinion” piece or an indication that an article is “In Depth.”
• Multimedia and more: Within each expanded story box, you’ll find a sliding bar of videos and photos, links to related sections and easier-to-use sharing options, so you can quickly digest the sights and sounds of a news story, dig into different types of publications and share what you find interesting with one click.
• Personalized top stories: The Top Stories section is expanded to six or more stories from three to give you more topic diversity. The first three stories remain unpersonalized and the same as before. The rest may be personalized based on your interests. To personalize your Google News experience you can click on “Edit” under “News for you.” You can choose the “Standard Edition” if you don’t want personalization.
• Less is more: The default view is now the popular “One Column” (formerly “Section”) view. We merged List View into Top Stories, as described above. You can still switch to “Two Column” view, which resembles classic Google News.

In addition to these changes, Barry Schwartz points out that there are some new options in Google News Settings, which allow users to filter blogs and press releases in their Google News experience. You can set it for normal, or select none, fewer, or more blogs and/or press releases.

As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted, this may cause some concern among some publications that Google has labeled a blog. A couple years ago, Google started trying to differentiate between blogs and actual news sources in its Google News search results. Among those labeled blog were publications like WebProNews, Mashable, Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb, etc.

There were no real criteria given for what made one publication a blog, and one not, and like Sullivan says, it didn’t matter so much until they made it an option for these publications to be filtered out. This changes things. That said, Google has changed some of its labeling, as it is no longer labeling WebProNews, Mashable, Search Engine Land or ReadWriteWeb blogs.

It is still unclear how Google is making the distinction. Some of those carrying the “blog” label have the word “blog” in their URLs – such as blogs.domain.com/… or domain.com/blogs/.… This is true for some of the stories from publications like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Not all of the publications carrying the label use these formats though.

As we’ve said in numerous articles, it seems silly to differentiate between blogs and non-blogs when it comes to news. There are plenty of blog-style publications breaking news frequently. Their writers get press passes at events. They interview people. They review products. They cover news in real time (or close to it). There are plenty of mainstream media publications that cover news much later after the story broke on a blog. It goes both ways. Are the labels really necessary at all? If a publication has been accepted by Google News, isn’t that enough?

Like Sullivan says in his article, it’s as if blogs are being treated like second-class citizens now. At least, Google seems to have let more people into the club.