Like some of our favorite news dashboard services, such as Lazyfeed and Guzzle.it, Google News has decided to allow users to create and save customizable news searches and consume that news in their own “sections.”
Part dashboard, part feed reader, and all user-friendly, this service promises to be both popular and useful. Users can create sections based on keywords and then publish their sections to directories for sharing with others.
Multiple sections can be added to a user’s Google News homepage, creating a customized, keyword-based digest. This feature is turning Google News into the infinitely segmented, infinitely remixable modern newspaper; and with all the sources Google indexes, it’s just what users need. Unfortunately, it also deals yet another blow to suffering old media publications, many of whom aren’t too happy about the distribution of their content in the first place.
According to a blog post today by Google News engineers Sharad Jain and Nilesh Agrawal, “One of the great things about online news is the ability to filter by topics. Google News has long recognized this, so we’ve allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.
“Now, if you’re using Google News and can’t find the perfect section, just create your own! You can do that by adding the relevant keywords. Then, if you are happy with the resulting section, you can publish it to a directory so others can benefit.”
Currently, the directory includes such sections as Space, NFL, Day in Photos and about 270 other sections and counting. And just for you, we’ve created a section all about the real-time web, one of our favorite topics at RWW:
What do our readers think? Is this new feature nifty, or what?
