It’s probably a widely accepted reality: Google News has not been the prime focus of Google in terms of resources and in finding ways to directly monetize it. Although it was novel when it was first launched, the fanfare and the popularity of having a kick-ass algorithm to aggregate news from different news organization sites has slowly faded. Make no mistake though: even though Google does not directly earn from its Google News property (though it does earn indirectly through its adsense network), Google News’ traffic and user base is not something that can be taken for granted. Personally, Google News has been my first stop in learning about current events.

So I thought it would be nice to make a series of posts about rediscovering Google News and all the other new things that it has gained, and offer a tutorial on making the most of this not-so-hidden gem. It may look too simplistic at first glance, but Google News is actually one heck of an innovation if you think about it: intelligent aggregation of news content that’s virtually free from human bias and that relies on very fresh and current search index is a very powerful tool to have. But this is also its downside: some of its best features may not be very obvious to the users. And while industry watchers don’t fail in tracking the improvements and new features that Google implements in Google News, there’s a few information available in helping users make use of this great tool. After all, Google news makes news reading a lot more efficient, effective and pervasive.

This is a first of a comprehensive tutorial series on Google News. So if you’re a new user or if you have friends who are just starting to discover the wonders of Google News, this will be an excellent resource.

The Google News home page is shown below. Although this is the default homepage, and what you would normally see if you click on the main Google Search page, this may not be what you first see when you first go a Google news property.

If you got to Google news after you have done an initial search in the main Google search, you might see something like this:

The first screenshot shows the main Google News page, while the second one shows the Google News search results page. These are just two of the many faces of Google News, and we will discuss more of them in the succeeding blog posts.