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RSS feeds for Google News search results have been broken for about three weeks, according to complaints in the company's help forum. Three weeks ago a Google engineer said they expected the problem to be fixed in about a week. Now the company has simply removed the links in the results page sidebar to both RSS and Google Alerts. Oops.

Inbal Drukker, a senior associate at Google News, said on the first and sixth of July that there are "engineering changes" underway to "improve Google News." So what seems like a loss today could end up for the better in the long run, but for now there seems to be a problem.

This morning, Google's YouTube opened up its Reporters' Center - a new hub for teaching citizen journalists to become better reporters by teaching them about how to prepare for interviews, be better investigative reporters, and how to help media organizations in the news-gathering process. Interestingly, at the same time as YouTube is trying to help citizen journalists, Google is also encouraging professional media organizations to join the YouTube Partner Program and upload more videos to YouTube that can then be featured on Google News.

Some users are being shown links to Wikipedia articles about current events clustered in the lists of sources on Google News, Google confirmed today. Those collaboratively written and edited pages will now sit side by side with professional news reporting.

Is this another sign that a fact-based understanding of the world is being eclipsed by an amalgamation of aggregated collaborative thinking? Or is it the ascent of the best the internet has to offer - crowdsourced news gathering and fact checking as an essential part of the story? We argue it's the later, but it's easy to imagine many people seeing Wikipedia on a news page and feeling pretty cynical about it.

Google released two new labs projects today: Similar Images and Google News Timeline. Similar Images, as the name implies, allows you to restrict image searches to pictures that are similar to a source picture while Google News Timeline presents a new interface for searching Google News. Google Labs has now also moved to its own Googlelabs.com domain and sports a new interface.

It's no secret that the Associated Press and Google News aren't exactly getting along right now. According to the AP, Google News and other content aggregators often come too close to violating the principles of fair use. Most people, however, would argue that these aggregators actually bring more traffic to newspaper websites, and according to the latest data from Hitwise, this is exactly the case.

Google just announced an interesting update to its Google News Archive, which, starting today, will not only feature the electronic text of a lot more historical newspapers, but also a scanned copy of the actual paper. While having access to the text itself is already great for researchers, having access to an article in the context of the whole paper is even more useful. For now, however, only a select group of newspapers are available in this form and a lot of the historical material is still stuck behind pay walls.

Just two days after Microsoft released a Google News competitor, Google has upped the ante by adding a useful new feature to their popular news site: Quotations. Google announced today that it is now augmenting searches for newsworthy names with recent quotes by those people. The quotes are pulled from news stories as quickly as Google News indexes them, which makes the new service a sort of near-real time version of Bartlett's Quotations. Quotes are organized by person and then made searchable.