Google News: Source Syntax

Google News has a special syntax that it doesn't share with the Google Web search. It's called source: and it works like this:

source:[name of source]

So if you search for cricket source:bbc , the information you receive back will be only from the BBC. What happens if you want to search for a source that has multiple words? You separate the words with underscore. Thus Washington Post becomes
source:washington_post .

Google News also supports the site: syntax and the inurl: syntax (and the intitle: syntax) and at the moment I don't see that this is much better, unless you don't know the URL for the site you want. You might not know the URL for Pravda, so being able to use source:pravda is handy. At the moment, though, I think I'll stick to the site syntax. You don't use up any more of your query limit by requesting site:bbc.co.uk than you do using source:bbc.

So why am I mentioning this source: syntax at all? Because yesterday I was trying to search for the two words "rediff radio." Every time I typed rediff radio Google News would rewrite the query as source:rediff radio, thus searching for the word radio and limiting my results to the Rediff news source.

This was a shade annoying. I did notice that there was a link underneath to search for the words rediff radio without a source: syntax, but I wanted to go straight to the appropriate results. After a little experimenting I figured out that either +rediff radio or "rediff" radio got me the results I wanted without the incluson of the source: syntax. So if you need to use the name of a Google News source in a Google News search, keep an eye out in case your query is rewritten.

By the way, I've updated my Google News advanced search at http://www.buzztoolbox.com/google/goonews.shtml . You can now search on some different collections, including press release wires. Unfortunately the scripts are still down, but once they're back up....

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