Google News - Author Search

[engine]

Google News Author Search [googlenewsblog.blogspot.com]

we launched a feature that highlights the contributions of journalists everywhere by allowing you to find more articles by individual reporters.

If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they've written

[tedster]

This seems like a solid extension of Google News. I'm testing it with an alert for [author:"First Last"] and I hope to see it working well.

[tedster]

Bad reports so far on the author alerts. I'm getting lots of terrible links to urls that do not show up when I do a straightforward author: search.

[Rosalind]

They should drop the link to "view all web results for author:AUTHOR NAME" until it's actually supported. Otherwise, I can see this becoming pretty useful when it comes to looking up the work of individual journalists.

[Robert Charlton]

The author: operator does seem to be working now. Can't say about the feeds.

Google takes a while when they add these features, and it's probably harder than it looks to implement them.

Author search is one of several features I'd requested when I spoke to several extremely nice and enthusiastic members of the Google search results team a couple of years ago (at the Google Dance in Mountain View), clearly very dedicated folks.

In both Books and News, I'd felt, Google was weak in returning authors' names. In Books, it was also weak in returning quotes, particular famous quotes that might also be frequently used in titles (eg, "to be or not to be", to cite a very well known quotation).

In News, journalist names didn't show up unless they were mentioned within stories.

They agreed, and told me that if such search features were implemented, it was because of that discussion. Who knows whether that was the butterfly landing that did it? ;)

I should mention that in Books, Google is now handling author search with a refinement up at the top... Books by William Shakespeare... or else... Books that mention William Shakespeare. It seems to work for most authors I've tried, even very obscure ones. The operator (not the same as the News operator) is inauthor: with the author's name in quotes, as...

inauthor:"William Shakespeare"

If you use the author's name directly with the operator, it helps to put it in quotes.

Nothing yet in Books for short and exact but common quotations.

[tedster]

My test alerts using author: have been working very nicely for a few days, now. I guess it was start-up bugs of some kind.

[tedster]

The bugs are back. Today my author: alert generated one legitimate feed and four from left field that had no relationship to the author whatsoever. I know this stuff can get complex - but this doesn't seem all that challenging.

A Google alert should not turn into a random spam channel!

[dstiles]

As far as I'm concerned no google alert for the past couple of years has returned ANYTHING except spam. This is for inurl and site alerts.

As far as I can tell all the results for inurl are spammers adding domain names gleaned from WHOIS into their querystrings, presumably to entice me to their site and incidentally poison google/etc searches - or probably the other way around.

The site one splits my domain name into two on the hyphen and returns results for one or both of the words. Almost never has it returned anything relevant.

Latest inurl one today was Alexa, which had virtually no information about my site (partially due to its bot being blocked). The primary bit of information it gave is that my site "ranked number 7031831 in the world" - which I doubt VERY much.

Previous alerts include aboutus.org, discussed ad terminum elsewhere. Say no more.

[tedster]

My most recent author: alert gave me an article tagged "author unknown". Not one part of the three-part name that I set the the alert for was anywhere on the page, or even in the source code or backlinks.

That's WAAAYYYY bad. And this author is not some obscure character. He gets published in the NY Times!