Experimental news platform opens to wider audience while Google tests ethical boundaries with Wikimedia donation.

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You can star an email in GMail. And you can star an item in Google Reader. Now, starring has come to Google News.

To use the feature, simply click on the star next to a news item.

When you want to look at all of your starred items, look for the link in the left sidebar:

A page will load with all of your starred items:

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This this handed to me, Newsknife has just published a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2009.

The big story is that Newsknife’s combined figures for sites owned by Rupert Murdoch put them in second place at a time when Murdoch has declared his unhappiness with Google News. (Methinks the media mogul doth protest too much.)

The Top News Sites of 2009 is compiled by Newsknife from its analysis of more than 311,000 listings by over 7,400 news sites at Google News during the year. Here are the news sources you are most likely to find in Google News:

1 Associated Press
2 Rupert Murdoch related sites – Times Online, UK / Wall Street Journal / FOX News
3 New York Times
4 Reuters
5 CNN
6 Washington Post
7 Los Angeles Times
8 BBC News, UK
9 Voice of America
10 Bloomberg

This is the eighth year of Newsknife’s “Top News Sites” ratings.

Newsknife’s ratings are based on monitoring the main US-oriented Google News site. Associated Press headed its Top Sites for the first time.

I covered this topic last week in my post, “Living Stories is Google’s Way of Telling Murdoch to ‘Buzz Off.’” But it seems like a great time to play the interview with Jeff Jarvis again. Hey, he made these comments after his keynote at SES Chicago 2009 — but before the Newsknife number were available. And he was dead on target.

What would Google do, Jeff Jarvis, slams Rupert Murdoch over Google’s role at SES Chicago

In the movie Notting Hill, Julia Roberts plays a celebrity who falls in love with a non-celebrity, played by Hugh Grant. When the press finds out, she’s devastated because it doesn’t maintain her elite reputation. She tells Grant that reporters will always reference the story and the photos of him answering the door in his underwear. She tells him, “Newspapers live forever.”

Google’s trying to make that happen with a new collaboration with the Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s called “Living Stories,” and it takes news stories and puts them in historical context.

When you view news articles through the concept of “Living Stories,” you can get the background, timelines and a good understanding of key players.

The display strikes me as a Wikipedia for news stories – except, of course, “professional” journalists and editors (whatever that means these days) develop Living Stories.

Living Stories is being launched as a Labs product. You can access Living Stories here. As of this post, there were eight living stories. Here’s a screenshot of the one for “Swine Flu.”

Google has put together a handy video giving a visual tour of Living Stories. Check it out below:

Google is attempting to appease paid content providers with a couple of new updates to news search features.

First up, they’ve added restrictions to the First Click Free program. This has allowed publishers of paid content sites to let users gain access to an article without shelling out a dime. Google is only allowing users 5 free accesses per day. Previously, it was easy to game the system and access a bunch of pages on a site without paying. (Call me crazy, but individual organizations don’t own the news. Can’t access something on Wall Street Journal? Fine, I’ll visit some other financial news site.)

Next, Google has released a new user agent for News Search. This is useful if you want to “de-index” (yeah, we’re looking at you, Rupert) from News Search but still be included in Google’s main search – or vice versa. Simply include a few lines in your robots.txt file and you, too, can get less traffic to your site.

To allow Google, but block Google News:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

To allow Google News, but block Google main:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

Google has made some enhancements to its mobile news site. The updates are just for the iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre.

The look and feel is pretty much the same. What’s new is more stories, sources, and images.

A new “Jump to” link brings a pop up box offering quick access to a specific news category.

Any personalizations you make on your desktop will be accessible via your mobile now, as well (as long as you’re signed into the same account on both).

Screenshots:

News.Google.com on an iPhone

Jump to

If you’ve ever had to type in a bunch of funny looking letters and/or numbers when registering for a site or making a purchase online, then you’ve experienced CAPTCHA. Google has now acquired reCAPTCHA, a provider of the secure measure.

What sets reCAPTCHA apart from other providers is that it uses scanned archives to provide the funny looking text. reCAPTCHA then uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the scan to text.

Google plans to harness the technology for its Google Books and Google News Archive Search.