by Steven Chevalia

Created on: July 10, 2009

Google News offers many customization options. Some of the main features include being able to drag around the order of the main news topics and even the ability to take them out altogether. First, let's examine what Google News looks like before any of the settings or preferences have been changed. When first looking at the News page you should notice that there is, to the left side of the screen, a side panel with different colored bars next to a news category.

The order of the categories right now should be Top Stories, U.S., World, Sci/Tech, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Health, and Most Popular. If you're signed in right now as a Google user, under the Top Stories main section of the page, there should be a little yellow section asking if you want Google News to add a Recommended section for you. The Recommended section examines your recent internet history and pulls up news articles related to the websites you visit.

In order to choose the order you want the News Topics to appear on the website you can click the "Edit" button which is to the right of the main Google News search bar. Once you click that you should be presented with a drop down menu which allows you to take the various topics and drag them around. This allows you to change the layout of the overall site. If you don't want U.S. news to appear towards the top left of the screen you can drag it down and replace it with Entertainment, Sports, or whichever topic you want.

If you would like to add a topic that isn't listed below it is possible to create your own topic by clicking on the "Add a Custom Section" button. The last drop down menu will be replaced by a new one which asks for a few topics and the number of stories you would like to appear in your new section. "3" is the default for this, and is the default for all preset topics. If you would like to change this at any time you can select the "Edit" button by each topic and choose a new number of news stories to display.

Directly under the main search bar there is a drop down menu which should say "Personalized." If "Personalized" is not shown on the menu then your country of origin should be displayed. Using this menu you can tell Google News which country you want to read about in the news more. If you don't want the news from a particular country you can change it back to "Personalized," which is what I recommend.

At the bottom of each main topic there is an option to "Show More" or "Show Less," so if you don't want to get rid of a topic altogether you can choose "Show Less." But, if you want more of a topic you can always select "Show More."

Google News gives you the option to have updates on various topics e-mailed to your Google account. In order to do this you need to go to the left hand side of the screen, by the sidebar we looked at earlier, and click "News Alerts." This will take you to a new page, in here you can type in the key words you want Google News to look for, the type of news you want (blog, video, etc...), and the number of times per day you want to receive updates. The options for choosing how many updates you receive per day are kind of limited. You can choose "Once a Day," which is the default, "as-it-happens", which will send you an e-mail anytime there is a change detected, or "once a week."

If you would like to subscribe to the Google News RSS Feed you can select that, which is under the "News Alerts" button. When you choose that Google will ask you if you want to use iGoogle or Google Reader. Choose and now whenever there is an update it will be sent to your e-mail of choice.

I hope this information has been useful. Have fun playing around with Google News and thanks for reading.

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