Mountain View, California — Google News is already a convenient resource for keeping abreast on latest news events from around the globe, but on the Google News Blog, they just announced the launch of a pretty cool feature called the “Custom Sections Directory,” that empowers anyone and everyone to develop their own personalized Google News section.
Now, the freshly released service lets you create your own topical news flow based on keywords that you would normally use if you want to get the latest news on a particular topic.
“One of the best things about online news is the ability to filter by topics,” Google says. “Google News has long acknowledged this so we have allowed users to track articles based on keywords of their choice. But it has been a little tricky at times. For example, to follow news about topics related to outer space, you would have to create a pretty complex filter.”
So, if you wish to sort-out any news topics of your interest that you see on the homepage, you can simply identify a few keywords, with assistance from Google, label it, and create a custom view of news. You can also optionally publish your Google News section to a public custom news sections directly.
To create your customized news section, simply go to your Google News home page, click on the “Add a Section” link located at the top right hand corner of the page and select from the current sections created by Google.
Or you can create your own by clicking on the “Create a Custom Section” button. This will take you to another page where you can filter the news items that you will like to get based on specific search terms, geographic area and source location.
You will also be presented with the option whether you want to publish your news section to the Google News public directory where other users too can view it. When you are done simply click on the “Create” button and go back to your Google News home page. You will see the news section you just created alongside the other default Google News subsections.
Moreover, you can choose to share your section with anyone by publishing it to the Google News custom section directory. There you can find many other different sections including our very own section.
There are at present 26 pages available of custom sections in the directory, and topics includes as diverse as Food Safety, Asian Business News, Brain Science, Lindsay Lohan, and Fashion.
Right now, the freshly released feature is currently offered to the Google News English editions for users in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but Google says it plans to expand it soon. Additional information on how to create and subscribe to custom sections can be found here.