Have you ever wondered why Google News surfaces some articles higher than others? If you answered “no” to that question, you probably don’t work in marketing or journalism. Google News is among the largest traffic drivers for online news sources and it plays a huge role in our day-to-day lives. Think about it. Let’s say you’re a reporter who writes about barns. You travel the countryside looking for the most interesting barns and you write barn stories....

Google has just released an update toGoogle News, bringing automatic personalization and recommended sections to the service. As of today, you’ll find stores recommended to you based on the articles you’ve shown an interest in before. A new section for US users called “News for You” will recommend stories based on Google’s stored news and web browsing history. The Recommended Sections feature can be found in the sidebar and, based on the same stored history, recommends sections you can subscribe to based on your interests....

As the never-endingdisputebetween Google and the Chinese government continues, the world’s biggest search company is determined to go headstrong in a bid to find new business in the lucrative country that has “tons of untapped opportunity.” Elliott Ng, Google’s director and head of product management for China, said the company remains to be profitable, with a record high in December last year, according to a report fromWSJ. Even though Google is still considered a small player in China, it is poised to continue growing its business in the country....

All Google Notesbooks content is being rolled into Google Docs, the company announced today, as part of a wider revelation that it is pulling the plug on several of its popular products. Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. “We’ll beshutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs....

It may come as no surprise to learn that Google is dominating the search market in the UK – and most other countries in the world – but the latestfiguresfrom Experian Hitwise suggest that Google has now reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the UK search market. In June 2011, Google Sites secured a 92% market share of all searches carried out by UK Web users, up 1.5% on the previous month and 0....