Looks like there’s another Google application that I haven’t particularly blogged about before. It’s Google News. It’s been around for a while now–so long, in fact, that it doesn’t say BETA underneath the logo any more! :-D

This is another one of those cool Google sites where you can just use it the way it is, with selected headlines and browsing and searching capabilities, or you can personalize your news page. Just like for your Google home page or the Google calendars or groups, you’ll need an account with Google, but if you don’t already have one, it’s worth your while to Create a Free Google Account since you get access to so many cool and customizable things.

And of course you can also set up RSS and Atom feeds for anything you want in Google News. Again, you can take advantage of the news categories that Google already set up, or you can create your own categories (with corresponding feeds) by just doing a search within Google News and then clicking the RSS link on the resulting page. Want something more complicated? Do an Advanced Search to create complicated searches or even to limit your results to news from a particular country or news source.

Since Google News references 4,500 news sources and is constantly updated, this is an excellent way to get the latest news from around the world on whatever topic you want.

And because Google products are always developing and evolving, there’s a new feature available: the News Archive Search, where you can search for news stories through history and see how the stories developed. They even have timelines that are created based on your search!

[tags]news, Google, Google News, technology[/tags]