How to set up personalized Google news feeds

By Mark O’Neill

Some of you might find this blindingly obvious, but all the same I thought I would write about it for the few that don’t know. A very useful feature of Google News is the ability to set up custom news feeds for your RSS reader.

As well as the news stories that Google News normally offers, you can also set up RSS feeds for news stories, based on keywords that you specify. Look upon it as Google Alerts on steroids.

This feature could prove invaluable for business owners wanting to monitor online breaking news stories about their company. Or perhaps journalists and bloggers wanting to keep tabs on a specific subject. As a blogger, I have custom news feeds set up about Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and about the local area where I live. All of these are sent to Google Reader which then indexes them with a search engine, tags and labels to find them again later.

So just go to Google News and enter your search term that you want to make a RSS feed on :

When you have the search results up for your term, choose either “sort by relevance” or “sort by date”. Which one you choose will affect what stories you get and in what order :

Once you have them in the correct order, click the RSS or Atom feed on the left hand side of the page :

If you use Google Reader, clicking the RSS or Atom link will take your custom RSS feed directly to Google Reader.