Which news portals are the top sources of Google News?

This is a question that many marketing & PR consultants have asked. As communication professionals, it is important for us to understand what makes up news search engines on the Internet. The more we understand them, the better can we plan our media placements and communication programmes.

To add a few sentences here on online news search engines, Yahoo News is currently the leader of the pack followed by Google News, according to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere Q3 2006 report. Also while Yahoo News is the 2nd most-linked-to news site on the Internet space (the first one being the New York Times site), Google News is the 7th most-linked-to site.

Now it is easy to identify from where Google News source all its news. These are the top 25 sources globally in this current year:

India’s Hindu newspaper figures in the 45th rank followed by Zee News in the 49th rank.

The report above is courtesy a wonderful service called Google News Report by Henk van Ess, an internet trainer and consultant for radio, TV and newspapers in The Netherlands. This new service reveals the names of news sources used by Google News by fetching the headlines from Google News’ homepage. These results are then ranked by score. According to the service homepage, the score is determined by a combination of factors: appearance day and time, prominence on the Google news page, number of appearances, and others, all weighted using a custom algorithm. The algorithm is designed to estimate referer traffic to the source.

Google News Report can provide the reports of 16 international Google News editions including India, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Italy, UK, France, Switzerland, French Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina.

Thanks to the Search Engine Land newsletter that landed up on my inbox a few minutes back for this link. According to its newsletter, Google News aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, so it is worth noting that Google News Report USA only found 1,256 of these news sources. This means that more than 72% of the more than 4,500 news sources have yet to see even one of their headlines make it to the Google News home page.

Focusing on India (Google News India), these are the top 25 sources from where Google News India takes its news stories from in this year so far:

These are the top stories this year:-

To get these India specifc scores, choose the country option given at the top of the page of the Google News Report website, or simply click here:

Enjoy!