While the common use case in News reading assumes a passive user/reader simply browsing all the available news for that day, there are people on some circumstances that needs a good search tool for finding specific news information. For this need Google News provides a very much able and useful solution: The Google News search uses Google’s top notch search engine (though the algorithm is tweaked for the news context).

Just like most google sites (but unlike many online news websites), search occupies a prime real state in Google News: at the top center part of the stage. This makes quick searching for news easy and convenient.

Besides this default quick search, Google News also sports and advanced search tool and two special search features: News archive search and Blog Search.

The Advanced News search allows you to narrow down your news search based on date, news source, location of the news source, and based on the other usual Google search filtering fields. The Google News search is one of the few Google search services that allows users to sort results by date (the default relevance sorting is still there)

The Blog search link actually points directly to Google’s blog search service. With blogs becoming more and more common sources of news-like information such as press releases, new and breaking information, it’s only right that Google included blog search in Google News.

Th News archive search is a novel addition to the Google News. From the news archive search page:

“provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods.”

Here’s an example Google News Archive search for jacques cousteau and here’s one on the Applet iMac utilizing the Timeline feature.

All in all Google News provides a top notch search tool for those who want to dig more about news items.