Google News finds the articles on the publishers’ websites either by looking at so called “news hubs” – a page which lists in a human-readable way the links to the articles -, or looking at so called “news sitemaps”. The news sitemaps are XML files using a specific markup, which is described and presented here.

Obtaining a news sitemap can be quite difficult with TypePad as you have to get familiar with advanced template tags while with for example WordPress, a news sitemap can be created by simply installing a plugin.

In order to create a news sitemap with TypePad, please follow the below steps:

1. Log in to your administration back-end, then go to Weblogs >> Design
2. Click on the Create New Index Template link
3. In the Template Name field type Google News Sitemap
   In the Output file field type news_sitemap.xml
4. In the box labeled Template Body copy paste the following code:
   
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
<MTEntries lastn="10" days="3">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication_date> <$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$> </news:publication_date>
</news:news>
</url>
</MTEntries>
</urlset>

5. Save the tamplate
6. Try to access the sitemap by navigating to http://example.com/news_sitemap.xml, where example.com is your blog’s domain name.
7. Add the URL of the news sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tool account

There is only one thing which can go wrong, specifically that while copying the code, a linebreak or whitespace appears in a place where it shouldn’t. To resolve this issue, just compare the source of your sitemap and the sample which Google provided.

Google News Logo

One of the complaints is that after Google has purchased paperofrecord.com, a service which has built the world’s largest searchable archive of historical newspapers, its content has practically disappeared from Google for a long period of time. Google has acquired paperofrecord.com because this was the most convenient and easiest way to add the digitalized newspapers to its database, but for many it is not clear why they roll out the content in small pieces.
In a statement, a Google employee who runs on the official help forums with the nickname of “Inbal” has stated, that “[w]hile a lot of [paperofrecord.com] content has been made available through Archive search, we’re still refining processes to include incompatible newspaper images in our index. We’re also working with certain publishers to acquire the rights to display their content. All of this takes time, and we appreciate your patience. We’re constantly making improvements to ensure the best user experience.”
This meant, Google explains that the content from paperofrecord.com will be available in the Google News Archive, it just takes time to process the acquired database.

Another — possibly temporary glitch, — affects even more people. Users reported that news items which appear on Google News are very outdated, for example clicking a headline often takes them to articles written back in August, 2006, or that all the news items are missing completely from the Google News interface.

Other users are complaining about the quality of the news sources and they are seeking ways to block from the Google News interface specific publishers. Interestingly, the users don’t want to block small publishers, but news sources like Fox News, which has been described by a user “not [being] an impartial newsmaker and their leads a[r]e highly slanted”.

Google Corporate Logo

“These new partnerships will enable us to host and distribute EPA’s original newswire content on Google News, highlighting the original contributions of even more newswire journalists, providing you with access to stories right from the source,” said Josh Cohen.

It was also announced that starting yesterday, each news article hosted by Google will have at its bottom a contextually relevant advertisement.
The ads’ introduction in the hosted news is done to help agencies better monetize their original content.

“We’re always looking for ways to work with publishers to help them distribute, promote and earn revenue from their content, whether they maintain their own destination website or not[.]“, the Googler said.

It was not stated however how the earnings coming from the ads are split between Google and the other parties.

Ads by Google

And finally, you won’t see travel related ads, because you are interested only in internet related ads. This is Web 3.0. And this is what the Google Ads Team brought one step closer by letting you specify your interests and then serving for you only ads related to your interests.

This is an opt-out/in feature provided by Google. The well known contextual targeting –which works as it works, usually don’t– will still remain the same, this will be only an add-on. But it should increase the user experience considerably.

The way how this feature works is rather simple. When the users select their interest on a specially designed page, a cookie is set. Then, when the user with the cookie set visits a page on which there are AdSense ads, the ad-serving engine will look for the cookie and will select ads based on the user’s interests. This is a feature which was asked by the AdWords advertisers for a very long time.

Even though there is nothing to fear of, users can also opt-out of this feature and then Google will not set this cookie. If you feel the need you have to specify your interests, head on to www.google.com/ads/preferences

There is a service outage affecting “a small subset of [Gmail] users” as Google says. Interestingly, there are quite a lot of service outages nowadays at Google’s end. Maybe modifying how the engineers are distributed over the offices wasn’t a too good idea, or maybe the chairmen are getting too many bonuses.

First, during February Gmail has several outages, which are traced back to the back end software which should improve the performance of the service. The software should redirect users to data centers which are not under maintenance when they try to access a data center which is under maintenance. Sounds cool? It is, but in February the software revealed the googlers’ a latent bug which practically overloaded the data centers the users were redirected to.

Then early March, Google Calendar goes down. Since this is a service with less interest, Google fails to communicate what was the issue.

Then yesterday, YouTube which is a Google service, announces that they practically ban UK based users from viewing premium content. Why? Because they can’t arrive on agreement with an organization which represents over 60,000 performers in the UK. The organization asks for too much money, YouTube don’t want to pay that sum thus it blocks the UK users. Much easier than paying.

Finally, and this affects only Devoracles and our readers, Google fails to communicate now for 3 days why our news-related articles stopped being added in Google News.

Even I am one of the biggest Google fans, when somebody mentions “Google” nowadays, the “headache” word comes in my mind. I miss those times when I respected the company, but, I can’t complain: the services which I pay for are working well. Too bad there’s no Google service I pay for at the moment.

by Gary Jordano
The article expresses my own thoughts and not my employer’s.