Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Which Sources Does Google News Index?

Google tells us they index “more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide” in Google News USA. Which could mean any number, really... and we know they add new sources all the time. To find out how much (and what) they really index, for the past days I polled roughly 1,4 million news stories per day by searching Google News for semi-random words every few minutes. I found over 8,600 unique news sources in Google News and made them available for sorting & searching.

You can search the data for single keywords, such as [search], which returns sources like Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Marketing Blog, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch, or Search Engine Weblog. You can also search using quotes, forcing full matches only... a search for e.g. [“TX”] (Texas) returns 2% of all sources.

Note that certain news organizations have several sites, which are counted individually (for example, CNN has CNN, CNN International and CNNMoney.com indexed in Google News). DBusinessNews alone is indexed for 28 different states. So if you would count those as a single source, you’d come up with vastly different numbers. Also note the list is likely not complete... there may be several hundred (or even thousand) more sources not found so far. Other sources shown may be removed from Google News as time passes.

Which Sources Does Google ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (20)

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