Google Adds News Personalization

downbad writes "ZDNet is reporting that the Google News home page is now customizable, allowing you to add or delete main news categories (such as business, sports and so on), as well as increasing or decreasing the number of headlines within a section. They've also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you."

Being a mobile user I love the text only option...

[garcia]

Being that I'm a mobile web user most of the time I really appreciate the addition of text only [google.com] news.google.com. It's not that the page didn't load fast enough as it was but the text only version is left justified and is rendered a lot better than it normally is.

While you can modify the layout to left justify almost everything now it still doesn't remove the "customize this page" box and a couple of stories (from Top Stories) on the right side. Oh well it's still in beta ;)

No

[brunes69]

No because it wouldn't be news, sinc eyou have been able to do this at http://my.yahoo.com for going on 3 years now. As well, My Yahoo! leys you add RSS feeds... Google doesn't (although they let you add custom search feeds, which is different).

Support for Opera

[TheJavaGuy]

Customized news requires you to have both Javascript and cookies turned on. Your browser must be Internet Explorer 6.0 (or newer), Netscape 7.1 (or newer), Mozilla 1.4 (or newer), Firefox 0.8 (or newer), Opera 7.54 (or newer), or Safari 1.2.2 (or newer).

Wow, Google finally relased a product/update that works on the Opera browser. It took a long time for Google: Suggest, Maps, etc. to work properly on Opera.

Kudos to Google.

Diamond Age

[IceFox]

This reminds me of little tidbit from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Because "in the future" all the common people got high targeted newspapers containing stories that they would like and it was a sign of status to actually read the normal full New York Times rather then to only get the articles it knows you are interested in. Kinda like /. already. Those who read only /. eventually think that everyone reads /. and cares about issues that are on /.

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:No

[self assembled struc]

3 years? My Yahoo launched in 1997.

That's 8 years by my reconing.

I mean, yeah, Google is pretty cool, but man, people really gotta get off their jock.

Re:Google devotion

[filmmaker]

That's not true!

There was a time, certainly, when it was true, but not anymore.

I've been playing around with my.yahoo.com lately. The level of customizability and ease of use is on par with anything Google does*. Not knocking Google, but only giving Yahoo! its due credit.

To answer the grandparent, of course not! I know this because, well, Yahoo's been doing this for a while....I didn't see a slashdot.org headline. Anyone else?

* the irony is that Firefox + RSS is just as, or even more, capable than either service.

Who says the age of free stuff is over?

[dpbsmith]

Just a few years ago, customized news was supposed to be one of the much-hyped big-money profit opportunities of the Internet, and... I'm trying to recall the names of some of the companies pursuing it as a business model... Individual?

The theory was that busy executives with no time to read the whole Wall Street Journal and no interest in serendipitous discovery of significant news items would gladly pay to get the news filtered so that they only saw items in the preselected categories of interest.

Yep, Individual.com [individual.com] still exists and appears to be operating on a business model of free-as-in-beer.

May the potlatch continue!