19 August 2009

Google News recrawls stories for recent updates

Google News has long been a thorn in the side of traditional printed media outlets, and the announcement of new recrawling and reindexing methods are serving to make the online news provider ever more reliable.

Previously, stories published to Google News suffered from the same drawbacks as printed media - once a story was indexed on the site, it remained static and impossible to update. Minor modifications such as typos would not be amended to stories indexed on Google even when the source story was modified within seconds of being picked up, as only the original version was indexed.

More significantly, the old indexing method meant that current, breaking news stories would remain in their original state even as the publication source was periodically updated to add further information or remove speculative or misleading content.

Google News Help has confirmed that it search engine spiders now check up on news stories within a "short period of time" and re-index the updated versions. The exact window of opportunity has not been specified, but has been estimated by one user to be within 12 hours of the original posting.

Eliminating this discrepancy between publication sources and their Google indexed counterparts sees Google News becoming ever more competitive against printed media. Google has previously taken steps to enhance its news service by bringing Google News to mobiles, enabling users to read the latest stories on the move, as well as incorporating Wikipedia links into articles to create a fully holistic news service that threatens to make archaic printed media as a thing of the past.

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