The world's leading search engine, Google has released a new and more sophisticated Beta version of their search service.

Google News, run entirely by algorithms that continuously grabs and select stories from 4000 news sites, generating a categorized selection of the news every 15 minutes. The algorithm (which still needs a lot of enhancement IMHO), extracts the keywords from the headlines and full story and detects the similarity of the news on different sources and puts the all together represented by a single headline but different smaller headlines chosen by the smart algorithm which analyzes the words in the story and decides on the importance of them.

The new look of Google News is pretty similar to its older sibling, Yahoo! News with some tweaks to make the stories simpler and easier to follow. Yahoo!, the major customer and shareholder of Google is definitly not gonna like the new service, since the simple design attracts more visitors to Google than Yahoo! which provides the same service. Yahoo! recently replaced the Google logo on the search pages with a little box reading "search technology provided by Google".

Marissa Mayer, a google product manager claims that the implementation is fully compliant with copyright law. They don't generate any news, and they mention the source, why should it be against the copyright law?

I loved it (and I was shocked!) when I saw the lead story today which was totally a negative spin on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech about Iraq. And guess who the source was? The official Iranian news agency [IRNA]. The news service launched by Google is a new and fair selection of the news sources and can attract a lot of attention from the liberal parties because of the equal look at the stories.

I think Google news is gonna be browsed by the Internet crowd as one of the primary sites to visit every morning. It's simple, efficient and does not show any advertisement or unrelated items as opposed to its rivals who show ads, stock quotes and weather forecasts. Google said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it.

Google has said repeatedly that it does not want to be a full-service portal, and it does not offer many features, like e-mail and personal home pages, that portals do. But it has expanded its offerings in shopping and some other areas that are important to portals.