WapReview

The mobile version of Google News. There's also a "Touch Web" version at google.com/news/i The great thing about Google's mobile service is that the way it works is not only good for users but also benefits the mobile web as a whole.

The full-sized Google News site has been around for years. Unlike most news portals which employ flesh and blood editors to select stories from the various wire services, other sites and even from blogs, Google uses special search-based technology to determine what articles to include in News and which of those articles are timely enough and newsworthy enough to deserve placement on the start page. While there have been some isolated issues with tasteless or worse racist stories getting into Google New's results, Google News generally does a pretty good job of picking up on what's timely and newsworthy. Google News doesn't show the whole article but rather headlines and some teaser text from the article with a link back to the full story on the originating site.

I was eager to see how Google mobilized News. I expected to see a mobile front end on the "big" Google News with a mobile-friendly front page containing links to transcoded copies of the same stories that were featured on the big site. But that's not what Google has done. They are spidering news sites on the mobile web. So the stories on mobile Google News are all from mobile sites. It actually works very well and in doing so shows how mature the mobile web has become. When I checked, both sites had as their top story a piece about Bush's trip to India. The web site's story is from CNN while the mobile site's comes from the Baltimore Sun's mobile edition. Google seems to have no trouble filling the mobile news site with hundreds of stories. Admittedly the web version has many more (thousands) but there is more than anyone can possibly read on the mobile site. Best of all, by linking to mobile sites rather than transcoding full web sites Google is driving traffic to those mobile sites - which will help to make the mobile web grow.

The best thing about Google News isn't the front page of algorithmically selected top stories, it's the search. This is true of both the desktop and mobile versions. Enter a search string and you will get a page of links to news stories meeting your search criteria. And because it's a Google search, you can use most the advanced features of Google's search language. I've tried "OR", parentheses "+", and "site:" - they all work on Google News, including mobile.

I congratulate Google on a very nice mobile service that showcases the depth of content on today's mobile web.