Had enough of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton in Google News?

If you’re like me, you will have had more than enough of the antics of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.   Barely a day goes by without some breathless journalist excitedly giving us the latest “breaking news” on Britney’s drunken freak-outs or Paris crashing into another car without wearing any underwear.   Frankly I don’t care!    Short of putting out a hit on them, the next best thing is to exclude them from your online news so you can try to pretend that they don’t exist.    Trust me, it works.   I’ve had “George W Bush” and “American Idol” on my exclusion list for ages.

Fortunately, Google News is very customisable and you can block stories from people you don’t want to hear about.   Search Engine Roundtable has a nice little write-up on how to go about it, so there’s no need to rehash it in full here.

Basically it works the same way as if you were excluding certain search terms from the Google search engine.    So the offending person (step forward Michael Jackson!) would get a big minus in front of their name (- “michael jackson”).

After doing this, you can get rid of the “celebrities” and get some real news!