Google NewsShow - Google News on your web page

05 February, 2009

Google have been busy lately, and they have released another technology for us to use.

Google News has been around for quite a while now and it is an OK news service. A lot people are using it. Google have now given us the ability to add Google News to our own web pages, with Google NewsShow.

Google NewsShow is a news ticker that you can embed on your own page. Currently there are two different tickers to choose from, a wide one and square one. See below:

Getting the NewsShow on the page is a piece of cake and we will get to that very shortly. But first, Google lets us choose some options for our ticker. Take a look at the page where we get our code from: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/newsshow/wizard.html.

Firstly, Google lets us choose the style. This is where we pick if we want the wide ticker or the square one.

Next, we can enter a search expression. This is important (but not necessary) as it will influence what news is shown in our ticker. So if we enter 'Formula One' we should only get news stories about Formula One. Or if we enter 'Microsoft' we should only get new stories about Microsoft. This is fallible though, as if you enter more than one word it is possible that it will link to a story completely unrelated to what you wanted. But that is the nature of Google searching that we live with already.

Moving on, we get to select the topics we want for our news stories. Business, entertainment, sport, etc. The selected topics work as well as your search term, and stories from the selected topics will be displayed with stories relating to your search term. If you entered 'Tiger Woods' as a search expression and selected 'Health' as a topic you would get stories relating to Tiger Woods as well as the latest Health news.

Then we can select and edition if we want which will allow us to concentrate our stories to a particular local area, such as France, Japan or New Zealand.

And lastly we can choose how many stories we want to loop through - four or eight.

With all these choices made, Google gives us some very simple iFrame HTML to put in our web page and we are done. It is as simple as that.

For this example we have chosen:

• the wide ticker (or the 'leaderboard' as Google call it)
• our search expression is 'All Blacks'
• we have not selected any topic so we only get news about the All Blacks
• we have chosen the New Zealand edition to try and localise our news stories
• and we have selected to have eight stories in our rotation.

This is the code Google gives us for this NewsShow:

Line two and line three of the code above are both on the same line without a break. We have only broken the line here for display purposes.

And the NewsShow ticker that it produces can be seen below:

And so that is about it: a Google NewsShow new ticker in just a few easy steps. Google also provide some further documentation for some extra tweaks to the service, but those range beyond the scope of our article today.

I wonder what Google will release for us next week...

ferrari_chris