19/10/2009

Google has no plans to become "the iTunes of journalism", but representatives for the search engine acknowledge their intention to revolutionise the online news industry.

According to Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News, the future will see the search engine pull together the full spectrum of news stories for web users, as opposed to simply aggregating similar stories focused on the same topic.

On the possibility of using Google Wave as a potential reporting tool, however, he draws the journalistic line.

"We don't want to become editors," he tells the Guardian. "We understand ourselves as a service or a platform."

Features already present in Google News, that enable users to gather information from a wide array of sources, include a blog search and the option to sift content from archived news. Cohen also singles out Twitter as a fundamental "part of the dialogue" when it comes to letting individuals access the full extent of a given story.

He points to Google experiments such as Spotlight and Fast Flip as further examples of the search engine's endeavours to emulate "the serendipity you get from picking up a newspaper".

Spotlight follows an algorithm which focuses on delivering special-interest articles, investigative pieces and opinion-based journalism to users, while Fast Flip has been compared to browsing through a magazine with its snapshots of stories from various online news sites.

"There is a lot of high-quality information out there," concludes Cohen. "Not only journalism, but blogs and other services. And our task is to bring this information to the reader."