Tag Archives: search results

Google to plot New York Times stories on Google Earth

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image of ny times stories plotted on google earth

Some New York Times stories will be plotted geographically, in real time, on Google Earth.

“The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we’ve endeavoured to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news,” claims the Lat Long Blog – written by the Google Earth and mapping teams.

The map allows users overlay a NYT news layer so that when they to fly around the earth, relevant news for the place they are hovering over appears.

This is just the latest iteration in a growing obsession by large news businesses to get their news mapped. It isn’t a million miles away from Metacarta’s Geosearch News – a site mapping over 14000 daily news stories across the globe.

That map lets users specify a place-of-interest and returns mapped search results presented in order of relevance – as determined by a combination of keywords and the specified location.

Innovations in Journalism – Twittermeter

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We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s graphs charting keywords being micro-blogged on Twitter.

image of twittermeter website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
My name is Greg Lavallee.  My day job involves web development for non-profits. I satisfy my development and data-oriented urges off the job, Twittermeter was one of a few little side things I did to keep my brain limber.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users post short messages via SMS, web or phone and to ‘follow’ friends posts with alerts to their phone, IM client, or the web.

It’s popular amongst the techy set. Knowing that it has a pretty stringent demographic makes looking at what people are twittering about more interesting and that’s what the Twittermeter does. Site visitors can enter one or more words and see them graphed over time.

The programming behind it is a mash-up of multiple APIs from around the web – nothing too custom.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
The Twittermeter provides a graphical representation about what the tech-set is talking about.

Unlike Google Trends, which just measures what people are searching for, Twittermeter is able to capture what they’re texting each other about.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Lots more. I’m redoing the system now to work with a partner who is already capturing similar data for a twitter search engine (Terraminds.com). I’d also like to track popular searches.

4) Why are you doing this?
Just for fun! I used to do a lot of data analysis and now I twitter a lot, so this was a good way to experiment with data visualization, data analysis and my urge to micro-blog. Try the popular big banker slot demo for free or with a bonus for an online casino.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Zero!

6) How will you make it pay?
I’m considering trying to have ads that run based on the search results, but otherwise it’s not really meant as a money maker… just a fun project to keep my mind working.

Google News search gets local

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Google News has developed a new feature that enables searches for location-specific news. Users can now search for items by the name of any city, state or country, or by zip code in the US .

The service is currently only available for news items in English and will promote local sources for local stories in search results, a blog post from Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna says. Reklama: Sidabriniai žiedai https://www.silvera.lt/ziedai

“We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located,” write Rohe and Ananthakrishna on the Google News blog.

RSS feeds for search results at The Sun

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Paul Bradshaw has flagged up an interesting (and handy) feature on The Sun’s website through the Online Journalism blog, namely that the newspaper site offers users an RSS feed for stories relating to a search term.

After using the site’s search, the option to set up an RSS results feed can be found at the top of the results page.

As Paul points out, this is similar to the serviece offered by Google News, but a quick search suggests that this is not a feature on any of the other national newspaper websites in the UK.

Google search looks to bloggers

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Word on the blogosphere is that Google is now publishing Google Blog search results in responses to main search queries.

And as far as the Journalism.co.uk blog goes it’s true. A search using just the search term Omgili brings up the recent post on our blog as fifth in the results.

As Problogger argues, this is good news for bloggers who will see their posts soar up the rankings and for users who want the most up to date discussion.

Several commenters ask whether this is related to Google’s recent aquisition of FeedBurner and whether it’s only blogs indexed by FeedBurner that feature in the results.