Google News has just launched a pretty cool new feature: Create your own news section. As you can probably guess, this allows you to create a new area of your Google News personalized page (you have to be signed-in) for anything you want. You simply fill-out a section title, put in any search terms you want it to look for, select a country, and you’re set.
Previously, you could make customized sections for Google News, but it was limited to single queries about topics. With multiple queries, this is much more comprehensive. And the pages look a lot nicer with images automatically pulled in. You can also now filter by source locations, restricting items to a single country or even state.
Also nice and new is that you can publish these section you make to a public directory. If you do that, anyone can then subscribe to (and rate) the section you’ve created. There are quite a few good ones that have already been created in this directory, like Mobile Technology.
Here’s what else this is great for: Vanity searches. As with most search products, the real key thing everyone wants but no one likes to talk about, is to be able to find information about themselves. This new Google News section creator is rather brilliant for that if you say, work for a tech blog that appears quite often in Google News.
“MG News” is probably the new pinnacle of Google News.
That’s totally awesome. Dead simple to create as well.
I just created a neat blackberry news section.
http://news.goo...4bafa2cf25eb0a6
Uh. Netvibes did this years ago. MyYahoo did this years ago. This is news?
made one for ya http://news.goo...8;redirect=true
Has anyone noticed there’s too much Twitter news on MG News? I mean, have we run out of things to talk about? MG News used to be so much better. Unsubscribing.
+1
I created a “jay+cuthrell” one and it’s still finding proximity matches vs. the actual string “”jay cuthrell”… which means 1 of the whopping 2 hits are bogus. So, it’s batting .500 right now.
This will be more useful as I become infamous. Perhaps.
Google news should allow users to create a section where they themselves type in the news or incidents in their local area!. Of course it should be vetted or voted upon like Digg before it makes to that city news page.
This would open up True Citizen Journalism!!.
Ideas for a good startup.Maybe I should work in it!!!!
This is pretty sweet.
Add me: http://news.goo...p;redirect=true
You want to be a little careful about too much customization in your news media. Don’t forget that news outlets can also give you a heads up on topics you might not have considered previously.
Really wish I could sort by date…
This has been in place a long time at NewsRunner_com. Still in beta…
Customize tab on the right, news feeds from 20,000+ sources
Pretty dope. Check it out.
While I do agree that vanity searches are one of the topics people like to search for, here at MeeHive (www.meehive.com) we have found that people also love their company news, TV show gossip, and sport team updates. For the past year we’ve been working on a personalized news service, MeeHive, with a more newspaper-like approach. For example, you can see what my personal paper looks like: http://www.meeh....com/news/tracy. We’d very much be interested in hearing what others think about MeeHive compared to the Google News approach.
Here’s a simple way to create a Vanity Page or a Reference Page. Add your name (or any term you want) to the end of the URL ‘http://mashed.us/’, e.g. http://mashed.us/MG Siegler.
Depending on the term, you will see a collection of results from a variety of contextually relevant sources. Try it out.
If you publish content, you can use these to create high-quality hyperlinks for interesting terms.
Crumbs. Messed up the URL in my previous message. Should be:
http://mashed.us/MG%20Siegler