Krishna Bharat, the founder and engineering head of Google News, recently said that the computer-generated aggregated news site is expanding its customization options for non-English readers, the Japan Times Online reported.

The article reported Bharat said in an interview he expects the site's news personalization and other features to become more widely available for non-English readers, including Japanese, sometimes this year.

"Google currently offers more extensive options for English readers to personalize their news site by enabling them to create sections that cluster together stories closely matching their interests", Japan Times underlined.

Google News was created by Bharat in 2002 with the intention to allow readers find news from different sources, not just Western media but from all over the world.

The site now has 72 editions in 30 languages and currently draws news from more than 50,000 sources, "ranking them according to the company's algorithm, which checks factors such as originality and timeliness of the story, the number of citations, quality of the source and other signals that determine overall quality", the article reported.

News Corporation's eagerly anticipated and widely publicized The Daily, the first ever iPad-only newspaper, was supposed to launch January 19, but has been pushed back "weeks," according to All Things Digital's Peter Kafka. The delayed debut is rumored to be a result of Apple's need to fix its subscription service, which would allow readers to make in-app purchases for a week's or month's worth of The Daily via iTunes for an estimated $1 per week.

Apple has strict control over all applications released on its devices. If such delays and other issues continue, will publishers remain cooperative?

The iPad, launched April 3, 2010, has taken the tablet market by storm, and has yet again reinvigorated Apple's reputation, not to mention its revenue.

Last week, Google announced that it had created new metatags for Google News that would help identify original stories and consequently, which publication got the scoop. The initiative aims to tackle the fact that hundreds of articles will often appear based around one story, and seeks to credit original stories with higher rankings in Google News search results. This change in ranking won't happen immediately: Google first wants to gather enough data to test the method's effectiveness.

The two tags are 'syndication-source,' which publishers should use to indicated the preferred URL for a syndicated article and 'original-source' which should indicate the URL of the first article to report on this story.

With regards to the latter, the Google blog explains, "We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise."

Business executives in Europe are increasingly getting their news from Internet, according to the latest Business Elite Europe survey from Ipsos MediaCT, Journalism.co.uk reported. And Google News is the most popular destination.

Although 95 percent of the senior business executives read newspapers everyday, 72 percent said they also visit websites on a monthly basis to get information. This represents a 63 percent increase since 2008, MarketingWeek revealed.

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