Google News - stuck in an embarassing state of perma Beta - has rolled out their latest take on cusomized news. It moves Google News, the creation of Krishna Bharat, one step closer to his original vision of the Krakatoa Chronicle, a highly customized newspaper.
The features seem to be only partially deployed (or perhaps rolled back due to errors) but you can find written descriptions of the features they've added on the about and FAQ pages.
Update:The features are back online as of 9 PM PST.
Without being able to test drive all the features, it's a bit tricky to see what is new and what is merely repackaged. It sounds like they've added the ability to drag sections around the page, combine sections from the international pages, and harness keyword searches on the pages themselves. The description below also mentions "sharing" which would be an interesting innovation.
Customized news: New! You can build and share your own customized version of Google News. Customized news allows you to create your own sections on the Google News front page to focus on, for instance, your favorite technology, sports team or entertainment. You can also rearrange your sections and choose which ones to show by mixing and matching any of the sections from the 22 regional editions of Google News from around the globe.The rest of the features mentioned seem to be repackaging of already existing functionality. One feature that sounds similar to Eric Horvitz and Susan Dumais's News Junkie suggests it could help you track a story's development, but on closer examination appears to be just oredering results chronologically:
Trace story history: You can trace the history of a topic or monitor an emerging story by clicking the "sort by date" option in your search results.The country and source specific searches have been present on Google News for some time:
Country-specific searching: Sometimes you want a particular country's perspective on an important issue. Our advanced search options lets you search over sources from a specific country.Source-specific searching: We always try to show multiple perspectives on an issue, but what if, for instance, you want to find an article you saw a few days ago on CNN? Our advanced search option lets you restrict your search to specific news sources.
With this release, the Google News team takes a decided turn toward the Daily Me with customization and filtering leading the way and away from the more personalized vision that automates discovery and includes elements of the Daily We, pioneered on Newsbot that reflect the community's interests as well as the reading habits of the individual reader.
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Posted by: clung | September 07, 2005 at 01:42 PM