In September 2002 Google News was launched in beta mode with the hope of giving readers the ability to read not only one perspective, but many, on whatever topic of news was out there. Over three years later Google News has finally graduated its beta status with some fresh features.
According to comScore, Google News garnered 40.2% of news searches in August 2005, while Yahoo! News obtained 39.4% of news searches, and AOL News got 19.0% of news searches.
These numbers do not portray the entire story, as Google News was dominated in terms of unique visitors. Yahoo! News was the clear winner with 25.4 million unique visitors, while AOL News followed at the #4 spot with 15.1 million unique visitors. Google News trailed behind at the #14 spot with 7.1 million unique visitors.
Google News was created to deliver news in “clusters,” meaning that articles related to one topic were grouped together on the page, but it now offers more than just that neat feature.
Since its launch in 2002, Google News has grown to 22 regional editions in 10 languages, gathering stories from more than 4,500 English-language sources across the world. On the other hand, Yahoo! News obtains its news from more than 7,000 international news sources in 35 languages. Topix.net gathers its news stories from more than 12,000 mainstream news sources and 15,000 blogs and has more than 360,000 topical pages available to readers. RocketNews has content from more than 16,000 news sources and 70,000 RSS and blog sources.
In its new graduated phase, Google News is now offering personalized news headlines. This means that when users visit the site they will receive recommended news stories that are chosen based on the user’s past news searches and articles they have read. In order to receive these personalized headlines users must sign up for Personalized Search and sign into their Google account. The personalized headlines will appear in the left column.
In the left-hand column there will also be a section showing the most popular recent stories.
“Google News has matured a great deal, and we’re proud to see it graduate from its beta status. Much remains to be done, and as always, we have many exciting ideas that we intend to take forward,” said Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News, on the Google Blog.
Source:
http://searchenginewatch.com/
searchday/article.php/3579746
Digg 
