Google News aggregates news stories from all over the world, stories are published within minutes making Google News an extremely powerful channel for news and communication. One of Google News’ unique properties is that news stories can be from leading news agencies or public blogs. Google actively promotes important news content from any source and does not discriminate from user to user. As long as the story is unique and important Google will actively promote, index and list.

YouTube have created the YouTube Reporters’ Centre for one unique reason, to actively help and promote the reporting of news from around the world by members of the public. The centre offers help and advice including videos from internationally renowned journalists including CBS’ Katie Couric, New York Times’ Nick Kristof and legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
The concept of real news stories from real members of the public from all around the world does have its appeal. The potential network alone would be huge and the actual stories would not be governed by political spin or government censorship. If this technology was to grow in popularity the potential political waves could be huge. Members of the public from all over the world could provide news stories based on real life experiences, but there is a problem. News agencies have always taken a potentially impartial view of a News story, effectively reporting both sides without bias or judgement. Will public based news stories be opinion based and potentially not offer an impartial overview of the story itself?

News agencies have nothing to fear from this new technology, if “Citizen” based reporting was to increase in popularity news agencies could only benefit from the growth. Although the role of the news agency would change, more time would be spent aggregating news stories and piecing together different reports from individual reporters on the same news topic. Effectively editing “Citizen” based news to provide a more appealing and relevant story to the news agency users.

Citizen based reporting offers an exciting opportunity for the news industry to evolve and grow with the increased popularity of the internet. What the future holds has yet to be written, but with Google’s immense power and exposure “Citizen” based reporting is sure to grow in popularity.

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Similar image is a unique system which allows the user to search for images which are similar in photographic composition based on the image itself and not the title or text of the image. It allows the user to sort through image results more efficiently by simply clicking on the “Similar Image” link. This allows the user to be displayed more contextually relevant images which are based on the picture composition itself and not on the title and description. Effectively the technology is able to visualise the image subject, understanding  the context and composition.

“Image search is an inherently hard problem to solve because it is a visual problem and explains why people say an image is worth a thousand words because it is so difficult to describe,” said Ms Malpani.


This new technology could potentially have a wide implication within the SEO community if successfully tested. Imagine if Google was able to spider a website and use this technology to read images and understand the exact context of a web site, this potentially would be the one step closer to Google being able to understand how to index a website based on a “human” interpretation of the site and its content. Although this will be a long time in the future the possibilities are extremely exciting.


Google News Timeline is another tool which has been designed to provide Google users with more relevant results. It’s the brainchild of the original Apple Macintosh development team. Timeline will display a historical timeline of news articles by date, week, month and year and will include Videos, Images and articles. The search can also be refined by publication type, including magazine, newspaper, blog, movies and music. The new features potentially provide a very valuable wealth of information which will be free to access.


Article Writen by Creative SEO, Search Engine Marketing Agency.

Matt Cutts, head of Googles Webspam team, recorded the following Youtube video for Googles webmasters Central channel explaining exactly how the changes will effect search results.

Matt Cutts stated that the “simple change” is not so much about brands, but about elements that go into a brand, including “trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality.”

“I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands. We really don’t think about ‘brands’ in Search Quality that much,” says Matt “It’s not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users.”

“The net upshot of this change is pretty simple. We try to return high-quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank. And so, what you should be doing doesn’t change: try to make a great site. Try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche,” Cutts said. “And it doesn’t have to be a big niche. It doesn’t have to be a huge, well known keyword. It can be a smaller niche, and if you’re still the expert, that’s the sort of thing that people are going to want to link to, that they’ll talk about, the sort of thing people really enjoy. Those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.”

Andrew Dismore, a Labour MP supporting the motion said, “A monopoly is unhealthy, Google cornering the market is not good for competitive pricing or quality of service. The Government should recognise that there is a potential problem.”

“The Competition Commission should draw up recommendations to protect consumers – in this case, the people buying the advertising.”

Is Google suffering from its own success? Google does not set the price of its advertising; the cost is driven and set but the advertiser, bidding for position in an auction style environment. Competition dictates the marketplace and this has long been seen as a fair method of determining ad placement.

“On the internet, competition is literally one click away,” said a Google spokesman. “We have to prove our value to our users and advertisers every day, because if they’re unhappy with Google, there’s nothing preventing them from switching to another search engine.”

Rose Maltais, 52, allegedly failed to return her granddaughter, Natalie Maltais, to the girl’s legal guardians in Athol, Massachusetts, according to the local newspaper the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

The young girl was in possession of a mobile phone which was in use. The Investigators contacted the girl’s service provider and obtained the phones GPS coordinates.

Each time the phone was activated the service provider updated the investigators with the new coordinates. This allowed the investigators to track the progress of the pair.

When the pair appeared stationary the investigators used Google Street View to plot the coordinates and identify where they could be staying. There last location was close to a junction by a field. By Viewing online images of the area the investigators found a motel across from a field, they used Google to find the name of the hotel and called the Virginia Police.

Ms Maltais was arrested at the Budget Inn in Natural Bridge, Virginia. Yet again Google provides yet another invaluable service. Maybe Googles new tag line should be “Protect and Serve!”

Myspace could be considered one of pioneers of Social Networking, established in 2004 and acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2005, MySpace currently has over 127 Million active users. It came to fame as part of the MTV generation, a place for bands, actors and film companies to showcase their work and interact with their fans.

The details of the alliance between Google and MySpace were released on Monday in Paris. Over the past seven months MySpace have been working on easier ways to allow their users to connect their MySpace accounts to other social networking sites. MySpace will be working with Google’s existing services to allow this to happen. Smaller sites with blogs and limited technical ability will be able to use Google Friend connect in the future, which will allow them to add social networking elements to their sites.

MySpace and Google started working together over a year ago on a service known as “Open Social” which was designed to compete against Facebook’s massively popular online software plug in repository. But the news of a new alliance must come as a shock to Facebook and their potential marketplace domination.

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