Google News has introduced a 'recrawl' feature which will check for updates in news articles and add them to its index, the Google News Blog has announced.

News articles often aren't static, software engineers Andy Golding and Kiran Gunda explain on the blog, and often change over time to correct errors or add new information. Sometimes they change URLs or become unavailable after a certain amount of time.

Google's news bots crawl the internet looking for new news articles and adding them to the Google News index. The recrawl feature will enable them to focus on collecting all the newest news articles, while still making sure that the index displays the most up-to-date information.
Most changes to articles are made shortly after publication, so Google News will revisit them most frequently in the first day after indexing. Then, the bots will visit less often.

"For readers, this feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links you might find," Golding and Gunda write. "And for publishers, rest assured that we'll be back to find your latest stories and updates as soon as we can."

Google News is a controversial product. Many publishers are concerned that Google aggregates their copyrighted content, and Rupert Murdoch has even referred to this as theft. In reply, Google has said that it directs readers and therefore revenue to publishers. A recent study, though, showed that almost half of Google News users only skim the headlines and don't click through to the news sites.

This development would make sure that the most up-to-date news articles are displayed on Google News, which looks promising for both readers and publishers. Of course, some newspaper publishers may not be comfortable with Google News revisiting their sites this often. One option is to block their news from the aggregator using the Robots.txt protocol, although this is far from a complete solution.

Sources: Google News blog, Business Insider