Google News tests 'trending topics' concept

Posted by Savita Sauvin on February 25, 2010 at 3:18 PM

Google News trending topics appears to be the latest in the online giant's series of recent roll outs, following its launch of the Living Stories open-source project developed in association with The New York Times and the Washington Post, the inclusion of "stars" in Google News to tune into favoured topics and the introduction of the "recrawl" feature to check for news updates. Trending topics is much like Twitter's trends, which identify popular topics.

Trending topics will determine the most commonly searched keywords by users, which will appear under "Trending Topics" in the sidebar or on Twitter search, TechCrunch reported. Google Trends shows the relative popularity of news topics, but inclusion of this feature in Google News will probably prove more helpful, according to a statement.

Image: rustybrick's Flickr photostream

Apart from trending topics, as a part of larger redesign, Google also aims to provide personalisation options that allows customisation of news pages by location or category. Several threads on Google News Help Forums reported the change, and a Google employee confirmed, telling TechCrunch: "At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our Web sites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design."

Google News last redesigned its news page in May 2009, adding more visual content to the layout. However, this time, advancements in the form of real-time content, including features such as the trending topics, are expected, ReadWriteWeb reported.

Google's intentions of helping or hindering newspapers is a much debated topic, but a Google News executive told NewsandTech that the search engine genuinely wants newspapers to get more value of their online content and "is ready to offer tools such as Google Checkout and other technologies to help publishers monetize their online news and information."

Chris Gaither, a former LA Times editor and spokesperson for Google News told NewsandTech columnist Doug Page in a press room podcast that the company wants to work with publications "in any business model they choose." He said Google has no intentions of becoming a content generator, and that it remains committed to ensuring that journalism and newspapers remain vital.

As newspapers assess paywalls, Gaither said that there are other ways by which Google can support the industry for paid content, with tools like Google Checkout service, which can be modified to help publishers.

"We are happy to serve as a go-between for publishers and consumers," he said. "We are not a content company; we are a technology company and an ad platform company to help other publishers make money. As a connector, we would much rather help people find content than to create it ourselves. (Creating content is) not something that we believe fits into our core competency."