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August 23, 2007

Google News Shows Videos

Google News becomes more interactive by adding video content from important news sources like: CBS News, Reuters, BBC News, but also from smaller sources. If there's a video related to a story, you'll see a link that lets you play the video without leaving the page. All the videos are hosted by YouTube and Google's explanation is that "it can often be difficult to play videos on the Web due to a wide variety of video players and downloads required," while YouTube videos are more accessible.

Videos are treated the same way as articles, even if they have less information readily-available. "We crawl any information included with each video, and then group and rank each of them as we rank an article."


After months without any new feature, Google News had many small upgrades this year: an image version, comments from people involved in a story, information from Google Finance that will make Google News more useful.

2 comments:

  1. "All the videos are hosted by YouTube and Google's explanation is that "it can often be difficult to play videos on the Web due to a wide variety of video players and downloads required," while YouTube videos are more accessible." - Original post.


    I completely agree with that statement. These Flash video players are very lightweight components, and can be easily put on any Web site without hassle.

    Also, video links show up even when you're searching for not only news, but anything else. I think it's a good idea, but putting videos means the search results are a bit more unorganized... (Would be great if they can do something like remove video results).

    - hobnobLover.
    www.hobnobLover.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. How does displaying video make it more "interactive"? That word gets thrown out there way too much.

    ReplyDelete

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