Thursday, March 10, 2005

Google News Customization

DevGuides points out Google News has a new feature: customization. When on the Google News homepage, simply click “Customize this page” to the upper right. You can then drag & drop existing sections, like “World” or “Business”.

What’s even better, you can now add your own sections for any keyword by clicking on “Add a custom section”. For example, I entered “Google”, and will now be presented with the top Google news. You can add up to 20 sections altogether.

Another nice feature is you can share the custom page you created. To do so go to the bottom of the page and click “Share your customized news with a friend”. A URL with all the necessary data included will open. Here’s mine, with a lot of search engine related news.

While the idea of a personalized newspaper is not completely new (you can perform similar customization at my.msn.com), I don’t think anybody ever implemented it quite as smooth, with such big freedom of choice in customized subject, as Google News did now.

If you want to add this blog as permanent news section in Google News, just add a custom section with the keyword Outer-Court (you can then label it “Google Blogoscoped” in the advanced options, if you want to).

Note: After deleting the “Business” section, all sections were permanently hidden from customization. I could recreate this bug on a second time, so I suggest you do not delete too many sections for now.

Google News Customization by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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