Google News Tutorial: Personalization

Personalization: it’s the next big evolution happening to search in making search engines more intelligent and user-friendly at the same time. And Google News is no exception: Google has made significant improvements to the service to create a more personalized news-reading experience for its users.

Personalizing Google news has already been discussed briefly here in Google Tutor but I’d like to build more on top of that and discuss more about how users can take advantage of this feature.

Google News was already customizable even before Google implemented the single sign-on Google Accounts. It used to rely on cookies stored in your computer so it was rather limited since you lose any customization you made when you access Google News from another computer. Now a Google account is required for personalizing your Google News.

The very basic personalization you can add is to change the version of your Google News. There are currently forty-one (41) international versions of Google News to choose from.

Layout
The next type of customization that you can do when you’re logged in to your Google Account is to change the layout and the arrangement of the page. This can be as simple as showing more articles in a section than what’s currently default to rearranging all the news sections you see on your main Google News page. You can rearrange the layout for the sections (or delete some of them) through the “Edit this personalized page” link which shows a drag and drop interface for re-organizing your news layout.

Content
Want to be updated about the latest news on Cats? With Google News, you can create your own customized section from a set of search keywords (and other filters such as news sources, etc.). You can do this by clicking the “Edit this personalized page” link on the upper right version of the main news area, selecting “Add a Custom Section”, then entering your news keywords. You can also do more by showing the advanced search options. You can also save a specific news search into its own custom section. The link to do this can be found at the bottom of the Google News search results page.

Whenever you personalize your Google News, that will automatically saved as a personalized version of which becomes the 42nd version of Google News (besides the other 41 languages).