Improvements to the search engine at Google.com are undeniably newsworthy, but on a sort of life-and-death scale, adjustments to the Google News engine are also important. And a few changes (and reminders) cropped up recently.
Unless you’re a terribly absent-minded person, these won’t, to be honest, have a great impact on how you use Google News. Still, they’re there if you need them. So on the Google News Blog, Sheng Yu and Sean Wan acknowledged, “If you’ve ever forgotten some or all of the name of a news source, in the past, you’d have to rack your brain to figure out the complete name first.”
They then continued, “We kept this in mind when we improved our advanced search. You don’t need to spend time trying to remember the complete name of a news source any more. Just tell us the words you know: [source:”new york”]. Then we will return articles from those sources whose name contains these specific words.”
There’s also a drop-down list of source suggestions. Most important, though, is probably the mention of site operators and keywords working together; [site:iht.com Paris] will, for example, turn up any results from the International Herald Tribune having to do with a certain French city. If you’re partial to one news source or another, this might come in handy.
Finally, in what seems appropriate to the time of year, the changes should be reflected in every different edition of Google News, so people all over the world can take advantage of them.
