Updates to Google News

Posted on October 1, 2008

Google News (at news.google.com) remains the best news search site. Now Google News has offered a new feature - listed on the left hand column of its news page. When you put in a name -- for example, "Colin Powell" or "Sarah Palin"-- clicking on the Quotes link gives you a selection of recent news quotes from that person. A faster way of getting the quotes you need without having to go through all the articles.

Another useful improvement is the Google News Timeline available at news.google.com/archivesearch.

Click on the Archive News Search button in Google news and then, when you enter your keywords, select "Timeline." This will give you results along with a sliding timeline: you can select a year or month to narrow down your news archive search to a particular time period - by year, month and even date.

The best search engine on the web is also trying to take over the browser market. Let's hope most of you have already abandoned Internet Explorer for the much more flexible and user-friendly Firefox. Now you might want to check out Google Chrome. (at www.google.com/chrome) As Google says, "Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go." Not as sophisticated as Firefox yet, Chrome is still sparkling. You can search from the address bar. Plus, when you just start typing in a web address you will get suggestions for both searches and web pages. There are thumbnails of your top sites and you can access your favourite pages instantly from any new tab. Want to bookmark a web page? Just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and you're done.
Some Google tools are still in the testing stage but you can try them out at Google Experiments at www.google.com/experimental/.

Why settle for results in Google the way everyone else gets them? Here you can pick and sign up for one of several "Alternative views" of your Google results -- a timeline, a map, or in context of other information such as key dates, locations and measurements.

Finally, why settle for a Google search page like everyone else when you can personalize your own page - -with news headlines you choose, weather, maps, even games. Think how often you go to Google - why not have your news and vital information handy as well? You can personalize your Google page at www.google.com/ig.