Human news editors are safe in their jobs for now, if ongoing independent assessment of automated news aggregation service Google News is anything to go by.

Newsknife (http://www.newsknife.com) has been monitoring Google News over the past year to compare its choice of top news stories with those appearing on key US and UK news web sites.

Latest results show that Google News chose the top stories up to 63 per cent of the time, compared to around 77 per cent for Yahoo! News and CNN.

Google is about to go public by selling around a 10 to 15 per cent stake in the company.

Interested parties include software giant Microsoft, who apparently approached the search engine recently to discuss a takeover among other options.

Google remains intent on an initial public offering and Bill Gates has been rebuffed, at least for now.

• Top tips for using Google search engine. Check out:
http:// www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html and
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html - try prefixing a search term with "define:" to get a results page full of definitions of your phrase.