Google to launch news search site

PALO ALTO, California: Google, the popular Internet search engine, on Monday will launch a new site for searching news from 4,000 English-language sources, from The New York Times to small-town newspapers.

The new service, called Google News, will be accessible through a tab on the Google start page (http://www.google.com/) and will pull real-time news from different Web sites around the world. News will be arranged under categories such as world, business, entertainment, technology and sports.

Beginning on Monday, search results from the news site will also be offered at the top of Google's general search page so that users who enter search terms on the main site will also see when that term is mentioned in the news. Google is not employing any editors to work on the service but will arrange the abundance of news it gathers with the same basic technology it currently uses to rank search results in order of relevance.

The company said its technology will rank news based on how recently it has been published, the number of articles devoted to a given topic and the popularity of the particular news source. "News is a natural extension of our mission," said Marissa Mayer, product manager at Google.com. She said the company began working on the Google News service in January.

While several Internet content sites offer links to top news sites, the Google service will be more comprehensive than most, if not all of them. Google is initially offering the news service for free, without any advertising support. It said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it.

(C) Reuters Ltd.