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'Custom Sections' in Google News let you get the news that you want

by Mihir Patkar / Nov 05, 2009 12:21:32 IST / Tags: Google News, custom sections

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Google News has fast become the most popular one-stop-shop for anyone who reads their news online. Its incredible aggregation services make it the most convenient way to get all your news in one window.

The one flaw, though, was that you had to depend on Google’s own way of filtering news to decide what is important for you to see. The broad categories did prove to be quite inconvenient at times. For example, a person who wanted to know what is happening in the world of mobile phones had to subscribe to the entire ‘Sci-Tech’ section to get intermittent doses of what he wanted.

But all that is ready to change now, thanks to new ‘custom sections’ that you can personalize to show only the news that matters to you. And yes, there is a section for ‘mobile technology’ already in there. Google explains how you can do this:

If you don't find an existing section on the topic you're interested in, you can always create a new section by clicking on the blue "Create a Custom Section" button on the side of the news directory page.

Section title: The title of your section. This will appear in your Personalized Google News Homepage.

Search terms: Keywords that define your section. Be relevant and creative, and be sure to separate your keywords with a comma. For example, if you're interested in news about entrepreneurship, you may want to include several phrases such as "startup", "entrepreneur", "venture capital" and "innovation." We make it easier for you to enter these phrases as you type by suggesting related keywords to add.

Edition: Language edition of Google News from which your articles will be selected. For example, a "Football" section with the US as the preferred edition will look very different from one with UK as the preferred edition.

Source location (optional): Restrict to sources from a particular geographic location. For example, if you are interested in the real estate market in Ireland, you could add a restriction to only show news from Irish sources. This is an optional field and nothing needs to be entered. Currently we allow restricting only at the state level within the US or at the country-level outside the US.

As you specify the above fields, our page will dynamically preview sample results for your custom section in the preview pane. This allows you to update and tweak these details and see those changes in your Custom Section as you're creating it.

Once created, these custom sections can also be shared with friends or the whole Web, so that more people can take advantage of it.

Quite a nice new feature, we say!

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