San Francisco — Wish to constantly monitor a hot new story being reported by multiple news agency? A new Google feature now lets you bookmark stories on the front page (with a star) as well as story clusters that appear in search results. Today Google News added the ability to help you keep track of a particular news story as it progresses throughout the day.
It is a simple but elegant feature that Google has unleashed to integrate traditional print-style news stories with the more flexible medium of the Web making the service a lot more interactive and useful.
Google has added the ability to star story clusters that are of interest to each user. New updates to starred stories receive bold headlines, to set them apart from the crowd. These stories are also accumulated in a “starred” basket for easy follow up (though the site only tracks your 20 most recently starred items).
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“When you star a story in Google News, it is one way to let us know that you are interested in that subject,” says Google News software engineer Jude Brito. “When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the “Starred” section of Google News.”
While the new Google News bookmarking feature is a great addition it does have some downsides. This new capability of Google News could become the news reader of choice for many people, though, because it includes so much coverage of key issues and does not work in a simple reverse-chronological way like the syndication method of subscribing on Facebook.
On the left panel of every Google News group–a cluster of news stories that share the same topic–you will see a star next to the top headline. Clicking on the star bookmarks that topic, and copies it to a new “Starred” section in the left column of Google News. Starred stories appear to move up and down the page of saved clusters according to how recently they have been updated. The richness of coverage that has surfaced around topics of interest is one of the primary differentiators between this and other services like it.
In order to utilize the starring facility, users must be signed in to star a story cluster, or to access their list of starred stories. This is one aspect of this feature that makes it even more intriguing. This is just another step toward entirely personalized news consumption, where people not cannot only pick favorite topics, but favorite stories to follow.
This is also another step to entice the average user to sign up for a Google account, and once a user has a Google account, in which users are able to gradually make using Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. more worthwhile to those hesitant in the past.