While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.

Google Web search has treated public G+ posts as search results since soon after the social network launched. Google is insisting upon making its new social layer a pervasive, personalized filter for the whole Google experience.

It's all part of an effort to redefine relevance in the way Google crawls the Web. Instead of brute rankings of the Web's content, Google has decided that personal, real-time recommendations are more relevant to us. Do you agree?

The U.S. edition was redesigned in May, introducing a one-column format, highlighted top stories and more multimedia links. These same improvements will now roll out for the U.K. and India editions.

Last weekend, Google News introduced the <standout> tag as a way for publishers to highlight their best content for Google News to aggregate. Now is a good time for British and Indian publishers to optimize their content for Google News. If you're looking for tips on how to do that, check out our post, How To Rank Highly on Google News.

What news aggregators do you use? Let us know in the comments

A new study produced by Local SEO Guide, PerfectMarket and newsknife has shed some light on the factors that determine rankings on Google News. Among the top 10 factors under publishers' control are keywords in headlines and page titles, strong domain authority, social sharing of articles, and being first to publish. Citation by other sources is also a key factor, as is the uniqueness of the text.

Google closely guards its algorithms, so the study asked the SEOs for some of the world's top news sites - including NYTimes, CNN, Huffington Post and more - about their strategies and compared their answers. The consensus seems to be that authority matters most. "I think the algo[rithm] is far simpler than search," says Christopher Angus of Warlock Media. "If you have a unique article, it will rank. If you're competing for stories, the major news publishers will dominate."

The most important factor is the source's established authority in its category. The qualitative opinion of the Google News editors is another factor. There's not so much publishers can do about those except try harder. But other factors in the top 10 can be easily optimized. Here are the key takeaways about how to optimize your content for Google News in order of priority:

1. Use Strong Keywords and Brief Headlines

Do some research using Google Insights to find the strongest keywords for your stories and use them in headlines, page titles and meta descriptions, as well as in the ledes of your stories. Related words and synonyms in the content will help, but don't be redundant; that will count against the quality of your articles. Establishing context is what matters most.

2. Establish Your Domain

Use a domain that connotes your subject area and begin the long journey of establishing it as an authority. Inbound links to your domain are an important long-term factor in how its pages rank, but Google cares about quality links, not ethically questionable fake sites. It's also important to have a strong link architecture, so Google can learn the structure of your site.

3. Be Social

Do what you can to ensure that readers share your articles. Share buttons are important, of course, but having a strong, believable, engaging social presence yourself is the most important thing. If a news organization is engaged with its readers constantly on social networks, the readers will share and re-share its stories. This requires social skills, not science, but sharing matters in Google News rankings, so it's important to establish it.

4. Being First Is Not the First Priority

Yes, being first matters. But being first ranks fifth among Google News ranking factors according to this study. Clarity, authority and social reputation matter more. Once those are established, then worry about being the first to cover a story.

5. Get Cited

It would be great to wave a magic wand and create citations of your stories, but that's not the way the world works. The story with the most citations in other stories gets a ranking boost, though, so try to set the precedent of being worthy of citation however you can. Authority on a subject plays into that, as does social sharing. Think about other organizations picking up your story as they're writing theirs, and try to optimize your work so that they'll cite your article rather than reinventing the wheel. In short, be the expert.

6. Don't Copy Other People's Homework

Unique content gets preference. Don't lift copy from other people's articles. Duh.

7. Google News Sitemap. Use it.

It's not at the top of the list, but explaining your site to Google using its XML sitemaps is crucial to make sure that Google News understands the architecture of your site and knows where to find the good stuff.

Thanks to Search Engine Watch for alerting us to the study.

Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...

How to Use LinkedIn Today

At heart, LinkedIn Today is a semi-personalized news portal. You start by selecting certain industries and news sources to follow. Your LinkedIn Today front page then serves up news from those industries and sources. For example, I am following the 'Internet' and 'Online Media' industries, among others. I also follow ReadWriteWeb, PaidContent and other sources that I like to check daily.

The way LinkedIn Today works is simple yet clever. Taking the 'Internet' industry as an example, it claims to serve up "the most shared news by people in the Internet Industry." LinkedIn Today knows which industries its users are in from their LinkedIn profiles.

For example, I categorized myself in the Internet industry in my LinkedIn profile (see below screenshot).

So if I 'share' a tech news story to LinkedIn Today, it essentially votes that story up on the Internet industry frontpage. The same applies if I tweet it, provided that I've connected my Twitter profile to LinkedIn. Indeed, Twitter is probably responsible for the majority of sharing activity on LinkedIn Today.

One of the best features of LinkedIn Today is being able to see who shared a particular article. Using my own Kindle article from yesterday as an example:

I can drill down on any of those names, to see what they do for a living. (btw I'm not in the habit of sharing my own articles, I only did that one for test purposes!)

How LinkedIn Today Compares to Other Social News Services

So how does the news delivered by LinkedIn Today compare to the likes of Techmeme (more of a curated news service than a social one, but still similar) and Google News?

As with many social news services, a few publications appear to dominate LinkedIn Today. At the time of writing, the blog SearchEngineLand had the top story. It also had two other headlines on the 'Internet' industry page. AOL's tech blog TechCrunch and social media blog Mashable each had two stories in the headlines. The only other sources to have a prominent headline as of writing were NYC blog Business Insider and mainstream news site USA Today, who each had one.

In comparison, Techmeme has more headlines per page and thus more sources - although it too is often dominated by just a few news sites. Google News has more of a technology bent than both LinkedIn Today and Techmeme, with services like PCWorld and Ars Technica near the top as of writing.

The Ping Effect

Overall, LinkedIn Today seems to be relatively well-used. It's already one of ReadWriteWeb's leading traffic drivers, which is always a good indication of the success of a social news site.

It's fair to say that LinkedIn Today has avoided The Ping Effect. Although, it's also never going to become the leading social news source for the various industries it covers. Specialist social news services, like Techmeme or the tech news community Hacker News, will always have a broader and deeper selection of news than LinkedIn.

But for the business-oriented user, who wants to stay on top of what others in his or her industry are reading, LinkedIn Today offers good value. In addition, the social hooks are actually useful - they allow you to find similarly minded people to connect to on LinkedIn.

Are you a LinkedIn Today user? We'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below. Also, don't forget to add ReadWriteWeb as one of your sources in LinkedIn Today!

In an email to newspaper publishers, Google said that it is closing down the project and will instead focus on its publisher subscription service Google One Pass, according to the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix. The project was similar to what Google has done with books in scanning and archiving the world's libraries. It was an altruistic goal by Google but may not be a fit for its future that includes Chromebooks and Androids and apps.

Carioli postulates that the New Archive project was more cumbersome than Google had envisioned or that it got fewer page views than expected. The truth is probably in between somewhere.

In the end, it turns out to be a great deal for newspapers.

Carioli's thoughts:

"Are we mad at that? Ehhh, not really. The deal Google struck with partner newspapers stipulated that, somewhere down the line, a paper could purchase Google's digital scans of its content for a fee. That fee is now being waived, and Google is not only giving publishers free access to the scanned files, but also the rights to publish them with other partners. In essence, Google just scanned a huge chunk of the newspaper industry's valuable long-tail content, and then handed it to the publishers. (It's been a couple of rough years. We'll take it.)

Users can continue to search digitized papers, according to Search Engine Land. The Phoenix was unsure if Google would continue to scan microfilm and newspapers that publishers had sent in to be archived but had not yet been finished.

Image: The Lewiston Daily Sun, Oct. 29, 1986

Google News has always been sparse but powerful. Its beauty is in the algorithm as it finds top story you are looking for along with every other story that has been written on that subject. But, like a lot of things Google, the interface was a little mundane. The new Google News is still not the most vibrant location for news discovery, but it is a nice step forward.

Within the sections, Google now only gives the top link as a primary headline for each story. Instead of a couple sub-links below the main headline it now as a "click-to-expand" feature, which is a button that pops up on the right of the story if you hover on the headline. It takes a second to figure it out but is a nice add-on when you do. Within those expanded stories, each is now labeled by topic section. For instance, if you are looking up the RIM PlayBook recall, it has two stories in the queue as "highly cited" and "in depth."

Last week Google expanded the "New Near You" feature to iOS and Android. It is good to see the company rolling out new features that keeps Google News relevant as applications like Flipboard and Zite track in users with interesting interfaces on the iPad and Bing moves to provide richer content and context on the Web and with mobile devices.

Google may be coming to kill them all.

Google announced today that its "News Near You" product, tied into Google News, will be available from Android and iPhones browsers. The beauty of this for Google is that it costs them essentially nothing to roll out this service whereas Patch and other local initiatives like Washington, D.C.-centric TBD.com spent considerable sums to break into the hyperlocal market. Can Google come in and wipe them aside in one fell swoop?

News companies are always wary of Google and especially Google News with the mistaken notion that the search giant has hastened the death of their revenue model. In that vein, media outlets large and small are probably not incredibly keen on seeing Google further entrench its news footprint in their backyards. There are a lot of facts and figures thrown around the hyperlocal advertising market but $100 billion is the number that is pegged by industry watchers ravenous for cash streams. If that number seems excessively high, think that it involves all local advertising of any sort across the entire United States. Almost all purchasing decisions are made locally and advertisers crave an audience that is as granular as possible that can bring feet to local stores and franchise chains.

As yet, no one large company has been able to gain a significant foothold in the market. The Washington Post tried with a failed initiative in Loudoun County, Va., the New York Times has a couple ongoing efforts with "The Local" and there are small startups across the country looking to cash in.

It comes down to a matter of consumer habit and preference. News sites that tend to do well in local markets are ones that are ingrained in the community and become as much a forum for what is happening locally as a news source. Listserv lists still fulfill this purpose as do local blogs. At the same time, Google has a great approach to hyperlocal - Google News is a widely used product, the appetite for local news via smartphone is growing and Google simply flicks a switch or two on its algorithm and entire segments of the population are served. Mobile "News Near You" may seem like a small update to an existing product, but its consequences could have a more profound impact than many people think.

The new feature has been given subtle placement on the page; it appears just below the Fast Flip section, near the bottom right hand corner of the page - where probably a mere several million people will see it each day. Its appearance was first reported by independent watch dog blog Google Operating System. At first blush, the new feature has some up sides and some down sides.

We've emailed Google for confirmation that this in fact where it's looking for sharing activity.

The Good News and the Bad News

Why not count the links in that real time stream and use those analytics to do interesting things in Google News? It appears to be a wise move, though it's nice to see the new feature displayed low on the page.

That's because these kinds of "most popular" widgets run a serious risk of building a self-fulfilling, self-referential, lowest common denominator news cycle that mirrors the old ways and worst parts of broadcast news. Not to mention the risk that the algorithms be effectively gamed by sites pumped up by drooling half-human spam-bot marketing zombie accounts on social networks. Some kind of algorithm must be in place, too, to separate ostensible news coverage from craven link-bait, in the case of sites that publish both.

It would probably be safe to assume that there's some hybrid human eye being kept on what gets into this "most shared" section, much as tech news aggregator Techmeme has humans augmenting machines.

On the other hand, such a feature could help highlight another perspective on important news being passed around. It might catch some things you might not want to miss. Individual human editors, pure algorithms and social popularity contests all highlight different content at different times. If I'm looking for general interest news, though, I'd like even that analyzed from multiple perspectives. That's why Newsy is one of my favorite mainstream news services.

Day in and day out, I'll take a long-tail of smart, topical content that enriches my life and mind, whether millions of other people appreciate it or not. But if I was on the front page of Google News and saw the "most shared" widget? Yeah, I'd check it.

For now, Google still calls this an experiment is only using the syndication-source tag in its rankings to distinguish among groups of duplicate articles. The original-source is "only being studied" and doesn't factor into Google's rankings yet.

It is worth noting that the hNews microformat, which was developed by the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust, already offers a similar functionality, including a tag for identifying the originating organization for a news story. According to Google, though, "the options currently in existence addressed different use cases or were insufficient to achieve our goals."

Can You Trust the Internet?

The problem with this system is that it is based on trust, as Search Engine Land's Matt McGee rightly notes. Nobody can stop a spammer from marking unlicensed copies of a story as original sources, for example. In it's FAQ for these tags, Google says that it will look out for potential abuse and either ignore the source tags from offending sites or completely remove them from Google News.

It appears that Google News has caught on to this (not that Google is slow on the draw) and has begun testing a Twitter integration that shows news from your Twitter "friends" on your Google News page.

The feature allows you to "connect your Twitter account to see when people you follow are talking about the news." After adding your account, you will see "a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow," according to the help document on the experimental feature. Only articles that can be found in Google News already will appear in the Twitter list - so it isn't really augmenting your Google News, but rather highlighting what you would see already with recommendations by friends.

The interesting part here is that you have two preference lists converging. First, you have the list of sources that constitutes Google News, and then you have the list of people you follow on Twitter. The friends feature only shows you where the two meet. This could be especially interesting if Google allows the friends list to show tweets according to what you're looking at on Google News. If I'm looking at local news, for instance, the friends column could help float to the top the most important news, according to what my friends are tweeting.

The pairing of the two seems like a match with much promise.

In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs. In 2010, Techmeme tracks all types of media web sites. Everything from news wires, newspapers, professional blogs, corporate blogs and personal blogs. That's been a natural evolution, as blogs have become more like newspapers and magazines - and vice versa. What's been more surprising is Techmeme's shift from full automation to a mix of algorithms and human curation. In this interview with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, we talk about these and other changes over the past 5 years.

GR: We're six in total. Same staff as last November.

RWW: Back when you started, there weren't very many products where a person could discover the latest news from blogs and media web sites. Nowadays there's Google News, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, et al. How do you position Techmeme now in terms of the increased competition?

GR: For sure, the world has changed, and as you point out, there are more places to find collections of news links other than Techmeme. But some of those same changes favor a site like Techmeme even more. Following even a modest set of users on Twitter, for instance, you're overwhelmed with tweets and links after spending just a few hours away from your stream. There's really no substitute for a news synopsis that shows you what's most important at the top.

RWW: Back in 2005 I mused that "mainstream news media organizations will be beating a path to Gabe's door to either invest in it or license the software." Has any of that happened or come close to happening?

GR: It didn't play out quite like that. We've received overtures from most of the larger tech companies over the years, but media companies have approached us mainly about distribution deals, and only a couple of companies at that. I'd say this this is understandable though: we haven't demonstrated that what we've accomplished at Techmeme can be done over lots of verticals and localities.

Tech.memeorandum, October 2005 (via Internet Archive)

RWW: The biggest change in the product over the years seems to be that it's moved from being entirely automated to being a mix of automated and manual editing. Can you tell us how the mix works in practice, and what benefits you've seen from that.

GR: Philosophically, I believe human editing plus automation have always been and will always be needed for top-notch aggregation. Pure automation sufficed for a few years for us, and got us to the point where we could hire more editors. But until editors arrived, Techmeme would often make questionable choices - like spotlighting too many redundant stories, keeping obsolete stories on the page, and overemphasizing odd topics only introspective bloggers care about. Also, obviously significant stories would often take much too long to appear.

In the age of Twitter and hyper competitive news bloggers, even a 15 minute delay on big news is inexcusable. Our editing helps on all these fronts: we can block the automation from posting stuff to the site, and instantly post stuff if need be.

Techmeme, September 2010

RWW: Is your new product model, mix of automated and manual editing, scalable? I guess that companies like Demand Media show that such a model can be scaled (not that I'm comparing your company to theirs in other ways). But I'm curious to know your thoughts.

GR: I believe it's scalable, at least for major news topics. New news vertical can start out with just one human editor, so we only need revenue to support one person. But it isn't scalable to hundreds or thousands of news topics. An aggregator on, say, mountain bikes probably wouldn't be all that good (due to a dearth of content and linking) - meaning it wouldn't attract readers that could support an editor.

RWW: Finally, what's next for Techmeme and its sister sites?

GR: More ways for tweets to show up on Techmeme. And hopefully more verticals.

Photo credit: Frank Gruber

Today, it looks like Google has heard the cries and complaints and changed the Google News homepage to "reflect your feedback".

Google is bringing back story clustering, rather then hiding it until users perform a mouseover, and giving back the ability to hid local weather forecasts. It is also making it easier to switch between views and is adding a two-column view, "which shows the three top stories from each section." Offering the multiple columns, instead of the single stream, was definitely a gripe among many users, and offering a way around this should help ease the blow.

While this isn't a reversion to the old design, it incorporates some of the old features. So what do you think? Last time, we asked "Did Google Blow It with the Google News Redesign?" and now we're wondering if the re-redesign has saved the day.

Earlier in this week we covered the new version of Google News. It's normal to see a backlash against a redesign (see the reaction to Facebook redesigns for instance), but reaction to Google News' new layout has been resoundingly harsh. So far, Google isn't offering an option to revert back to the old version, unlike it did with its last major Gmail update. It seems Google's attempt to balance personalization and serendipity left fans of both unhappy.

New Google News layout

Among users who value customization, the ability to rank news certain sources up or down (except, apparently, Associated Press) or arrange topics vertically in the center column does not make up for the rigidity of the other sections. One large annoyance that some users reported, including our researcher Deane Rimerman, is the disappearance of custom sections created in the old version of the site, leaving users to re-create each section. We were also unable to find an option to have news alerts sent by e-mail, though we could still create RSS feeds of searches. Users can still setup and mange news alerts through Google Alerts.

Previous version of Google News

One Google News user, who commented on our original post, told us via e-mail: "I had Google's news in one column, prioritized the way I liked it, and sections in the other, prioritized the same way. If I was looking for something professionally related, I could scan the one column; if I was taking a break and wanted to see the rest of the news, I could scan the other." With all news in one column, this isn't an option anymore.

Those who value serendipity say they benefited more from the old layout with several blocks of stories on different subjects on the screen at once than from the new layout. Spotlight should be the serendipity engine of the site, but the long, image-less list of headlines is below the fold on most monitors. It's more like a cluttered stack of newspaper clippings stashed off to the side of your desk than a showcase of stories you might otherwise miss.

The reaction to the new layout may signal a preference for dashboards over river of news views. Last year RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick eulogized enterprise RSS. A couple people mentioned, with prescience, dashboards as the possible vector for future RSS adoption. In November of last year, Netvibes landed a deal to bring its dashboards into Sage's ERP software. It's reasonable to expect consumers to have similar preferences - after all, Netvibes started as a consumer oriented service.

So did Google blow it? Amber Case, a UX designer for Vertigo, says "Interfaces should not suddenly change. That's the equivalent of suddenly remodeling a favorite neighbor bar without telling anyone, except that the architecture was so different that the bathrooms are in a different place."

Case thinks users will get used to the new layout, but for now it's an agitation. "Now people have to navigate around glaciers of functionality that can't be moved. It's better to have an empty ocean that people can create their own islands of usefulness, and their own bridges between them," she says.

Many users say they're looking elsewhere for a news portal. Good Noows is cited often as an alternative to Google News, and Ask News has a layout very similar to the previous version of Google News.

Google News Fail macro generated with roflbot, new Google News screenshot via Google News, old Google News screenshot via Spy