Around Christmas, Google was all gleaming with pride at their recently (at the time) released algorithm that was supposedly the best ever, analyzing sources and organizing them in order of importance: the closer they were to the place where the actual event that created the news happened, the bigger the chances it had of having something new that would complement the story.

Serouroundtable.com's "rustybrick" noticed after following the Google Groups forum that one flaw in this system was observed by a user calling himself "imd tom" who posted a question about it. Is there a way to get an article reindexed in Google News once it had gone through a revision or after being updated? There was also a second part to it, if changing the publication date in the Google News Sitemap helps with that. The answer didn't take long to come and it was unfortunate for those who update their news instead of writing a new one about the changes occurring in the meantime.

"Currently the crawler crawls a particular article at a particular URL
once. So in short, no," Marcela, a news guide answered. Basically despite being able to "think" which piece of news is better suited to have useful information regarding a certain subject, it does not bother to look for updates, although the way I see it, that would be pretty simple to do.

Some other options other than just publishing the piece of news again under a different URL, update included, "may" be available in the future but nothing is for certain. What do you know, despite coming with the fanfare behind it, the almighty Google News algorithm doesn't quite provide the bang per buck as it was "advertised" (although I think "praised" would be a better term to use).