If we look back at the main Google News page, you will see three main parts: Navigation and Tools on the left sidebar, Search on the top section, and for the rest of the page, the main News section.

The left sidebar is composed of the navigation menu, which provides the links to different sections offered by Google News such as World, Business, Science and Technology, Health, Entertainment and others.

Clicking on one of these section links will bring you to a section page, which lists all the news items that falls under the givens section.

The main news section provides you a birds eye view of all the news stories, the overall Top stories occupying the topmost (and most prominent real estate) and the top news for each section shown below.

Although by default, only the top four news stories are features for each section, you can actually show more ore fewer stories without leaving the main Google News page. Just make use of the “more” and “fewer” buttons found at the bottom of each section.

When you are logged in to your Google account and you first click on these links/buttons, Google News will give you a feedback that you have personalized Google News.
Indeed, this setting on more / less stories to show on a section will be saved be saved on your Google account preferences such that next time you visit Google News when you are logged in (or when you’re in the same computer) you will see the same numbers of top stories for that section shown in the main page.

This is actually just one of the may things that you can personalize in Google News. I will discuss more personalization features later.

I will discuss the search feature on the next blog post because there are a lot of things to be said about it, but before we continue, I’d like to do a quick recap on the anatomy of a Google News item:

The first part (highlighted in red above) contains details about the news article, which includes the News title, the source of the Article, the time when the news was published and as snippet from the actual article itself.

The lower part is all about things that are related to that particular news item. It shows the top two related News headlines along with their source, and below that, in green shows the top 4 news organizations / sources with news items related to that particular news item. Found on the last line (in bold) is a link that will show you all the other news items that are related to the particular news item.

Merely knowing this anatomy of the Google News item will do you wonders in jump-starting your news reading / researching.