Get the News from Google

Google News is a custom Internet newspaper with articles from 4,500 different news sources and the search functions of Google. You can find Google News at http://news.google.com

Google News lets you read all the news from various sources on the web or just the news subjects that interest you.

Google News resembles the front page of a newspaper. Top Stories are listed towards the top of the page, or above the fold in newspaper terms. Scrolling down reveals more news categories, such as World, US, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Health, and Sci/Tech.

You can also go directly to a full page of one of these sections by clicking on the category link on the left side of the page or clicking on the category heading above the page. This would be the Internet equivalent of going straight to the sports page or the entertainment section.

Google News shows the news source and the date it was published. (e.g. "Reuters 1 hour ago") This lets you find the freshest news article. It's particularly helpful with breaking stories. Only articles written within 30 days are listed in Google News. Older articles are more accessible through a Google Web search.

Summaries

Just as a newspaper offers part of a news article on the front page and then directs you to an interior page, Google News items only provide the first paragraph or so of a news item. To read more, you must click on the headline, which will direct you to the story's source. Some news items also have a thumbnail image.

Hosted News

In the summer of 2007, Google began hosting Associated Press items on Google's servers. This will likely irritate the smaller news sites that would previously have benefited from traffic. However, it doesn't change how Google News works for users.

Google News clusters similar articles. Often many newspapers will republish the same article from the Associated Press or they'll write a similar article based on someone else's article.

Clustered articles are listed as a series of links by article title. Instead of a summary, just the news source is listed. Clustered articles are chosen by computer algorithm based on many factors, including the keywords and the date of publication.

You can search through Google News articles the same way you'd search for web pages on the main Google search engine. At the top of the Google News home page, you can enter text into the Google keyword search box and then press the Search News button.