Google News

The recent economic crisis has lead to increasing number of visitors to news websites. On a comparison with the top three UK News websites, Yahoo, Google and MSN by Hitwise, it was found that all three websites are having huge increase in traffic during the last few months.

The report also depicts that Google has seen the most consistent traffic over the last three years and that Yahoo! has increased in its market share during 2008. However, Google relies on third-party websites for its traffic and its own properties constitute only 67.2% while Yahoo has 84.6% and MSN with 81.8%.

Analyzing the email patterns, Robin Goad, Research Director for Hitwise UK stated that 18.9% of people who visit Yahoo UK News later go for an email service while just 1.7% of Google UK News visitors use an email service afterwards. The reason being, Google users send a link to the original story instead of links to Google News.

The recent downward trend in the global markets has made more UK visitors show interest in news which has resulted in an overall traffic increase in all news websites.

The new SmartSpace from GoDaddy can help even an internet dummy to create a site at ease which has photo galleries, email addresses, chat rooms and a blog. That’s what SmartSpace claims in its caption, “Be live on the web immediately with an instantly connected domain!”

SmartSpace offers a free blog tool, a free photo site and free social space once you order a domain name with SmartSpace at Godaddy. Social space is an application by Smart Space which can be used to collect and display dynamic information from Flicker, YouTube, Google News and Facebook profiles.

The tool has a clean and simple interface as it caters to users who are not technically sound. The tool guides the user step by step based on the features requested. The only requirement needed from the user would be to choose the layouts, color preferences and customize it. That’s not a big requirement and hey it’s your website and you need to decide them.

The SmartSpace feature can be accessed by logging in using your regular username and password. With many new domain sellers and hosting providers arraying into the market, hosting providers have to provide additional features with little or no cost to hold on to their existing customers.

Google is known for it’s innovate thinking which has made them leaders in Internet search and applications. Google Earth has now incorporated Google News displaying related news specific to the area.

To activate this interesting feature, navigate to the “Layers” menu found on the left side of Google Earth. Click on the Gallery to expand it. You would find “Google News” option. Check the box next to Google News Layer. To read the complete news story, click on the News icon.

Google News on Google Earth constantly updates index stories from more than 4,500 news sources worldwide. You can zoom into your areas of interest or your native cities to know more about regional, national, and local news.

It all started as a prank by a 15 year old Tom Van detta. He tried to post an article which stated that he has been recruited by Google to work from home and that they would be paying a low salary.

Van detta, found out from a blog that there is a possibility of fooling Google’s news system by publishing fake news releases. He decided to try this out and submitted a fake release which claimed that this 15-year old New Jersey student has been recruited as one of Google’s youngest employees.

Tom used one of the free news services to post this news release. The news release claimed that Google Spokesman Sonya Johnson informs that the search engine giant Google Inc has recruited a 15 year old student after discovering his blog and his expertise in working with AJAX and Javascript. It also mentioned that he would be paid a low salary. However, the salary would be placed in a bank for his future education by none other than the CEO, Larry Page.

Merely few hours after this press release, he found out that this news has become the top news in Digg making it an incredible international technology story of the day. Google started displaying the reference in its own Google News.

Google engineers have to work on a filter which would check the creditability of any news that is being displayed in its search engine results to avoid such misleading news stories.