The restructuring process marches on at Google. In the recent months Google discontinued Google Health, Google Dictionary, Google Wave, Google Labs has been set a timeline, and , on Thursday, Google announced that they would be discontinuing with Googlebot-News. However, this does not mean that they will no longer be crawling news sites. Google will continue crawling the news sites with Googlebot, the bot that crawls sites for Web search.
To enable this, says a Googlewebmastercentral post, Google News updated the infrastructure to allow crawling with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot. Saying that this will mean very little difference to publishers, the post said that if any news organization wishes to opt out of Google News they can continue to do so by using the Disallow directive in robots.txt to block Googlebot-News. Even though Google will now crawl the news sites as Googlebot, they will still respect the Googlebot-News robots.txt directive.
Searchengineland presumes that , alternatively, if you want to allow your content in Google News and block it from web search, you can do so by using the Disallow directive for Googlebot and and Allow directive for Googlebot-News.
However, if you want to collect data about how your site is being crawled in order to bring in some improvements, this change makes things a bit difficult.
To quote, if you notice that your news articles are not being indexed in Google News, you check the news-specific crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools and if you don’t notice any problems, you cannot check your server logs to see it those articles are being crawled for the news index. This less granular insight makes it tough to troubleshoot problems.
Earlier you could review your server logs, see that Googlebot-News was crawling particular URLs and then check to see if the URLs that had not been crawled are in the sitemap. With the tweakings, the server logs will only let you know whether Google is crawling the URLs or not. You will not be able to decipher whether Google is crawling web search but not News.
Before the changes, you could track down why particular pages on your site are not indexed by reviewing your server logs, but post the change, it will now appear as though the pages are being crawled, even if they are being crawled only for Google News.
However, some granular insight is still available, you can get News-specific and Web-specific crawl errors from Google Webmaster tools to find whether your website pages are being crawled by Google News and Web Search.
When Google News was launched, Googlebot crawled for both web search and News. Later, news publishers asked for a news-specific bot, in order to block and allow content from Google News separately from Web search. Now, though that functionality remains, the granular insight which was available is lost.
Google Squared to be Discontinued:
In another development, in line with its decision to close down Google Labs, Google set a time line for shutting down its Google Squared service. Come September 5 and Google Squared, a search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet will be wound up.
Google Slide to be Dissolved:
Turning focus on its recently introduced social network, Google+, the search engine giant has decided to dissolve Slide, the social apps company which it had acquired for $ 182 million in August 2010. Though most of the Slide team will continue working at Google, Slide founder and Google VP Max levchin will be leaving the company.
Larry Page and his associates have set a lot by Google+ and are seeking to streamline Google’s operations before they become a drag on the company.