Google News offers related news searches

When searching for a keyword in Google News you'll see (if you scroll all the way down) a list of related news searches. This is a new feature that will suggest other search terms based on some automated algorithms, making sometimes connections between specific stories. Example, searching for guns will show the following related searches:

This related news searches feature also shows connections where you wouldn't think there would be any. For instance one of the suggested related searches for guns is OJ Simpson - because he was accused of robbery with a firearm - so Google News already made a connection between guns and the robbery. Plus, Las Vegas hotel is mentioned there too, because that's where the assumed robbery took place. Smart isn't it.

Doing another search for Obama, Google News shows these related searches:

The related searches seem somehow normal, however only 2 of the six related searches actually contain the keyword Obama. I know that people searching for Obama are interested in news about Hillary and McCain, but why do these related searches on the Google News page are so different from those displayed on the normal Google Search page (see image below)?

On the normal Google Search page the related searches are actually popular keywords but closely related to the original keyword you used - however on the Google News page the related searches are keywords that are somehow related with the original keyword, but popular in the Google News search.
Here's an example, when doing a Google Search for Obama you see Obama Muslim as a related search. When doing a Google News search for Obama you don't see Obama Muslim as a related news search, mainly because the other related news searches are more popular than this one. So on Google News related searches primes the popularity in the News section, while on Google Search primes the connection with your original keyword.

Live Search News gets updated

See, Microsoft's Live Search team is (somehow) productive too. They recently announced several improvements for the Live News Search service (or Live Search News?).
What I like in this update:

• Playing multimedia without leaving the news search results page. On the news results page they incorporate images and videos with "smart-motion thumbnails". What's nice about this is that you can watch the videos related to the news search you performed by hovering the video thumbnail and clicking the small Play icon.
• Related news searches. To the right of the news results (note this Google, to the right, not above or below the results!) you'll see a Related Searches list that shows up to 8 items based on the popularity of their searches (via the News interface?).
• They finally offer (some) news, as the headlines are updated "to the minute" if you use the Most Recent sort option - plus you can refine the news by the category they're part of (still shown on the right side).

You can give it a try too, say do a search for earthquake on Live Search and see how this compares to the same Google News earthquake query. I know, they say that the Live News Search updates faster now (even when using the Sort by Relevance filter), yet the newest result on Google News search is about the Illinois earthquake updated an hour ago, while the newest result on Live News earch shows as being updated 5 hours ago. There's some work to do here for the Live Search team, as availability is the most important feature for news - they'll get there soon as it seems they'll add news from blog sources too.

"Obama said about Iraq" - find quotes with Google News

Google News recently introduced a feature that allows searching for quotes. Actually when you search the name of an important person (be it a politician like Barack Obama or a geek like Bill Gates) you'll see at the top of the news results a quote that this VIP used in a recent interview, for instance searching on Google News for Barack Obama will show a grey box at the top with his latest quote:

And this is not all, if you click on his name (under the quote, "by Barack Obama") you'll see a list of all his quotes that Google News indexed in the published news:

Now it gets more interesting, on the page where all his quotes are listed, there's a search box to the left that lets you "Search these quotes" - what this does is searching within all his quotes for a specific word, so if you enter Iraq in there, Google News will show all the quotes where Obama mentioned Iraq. Useful if you want to test yourself the honesty of a politician - searching for instance for NAFTA in a list of quotes by Hillary Clinton.