It seems that some respondents of our information source survey decided to tack on a few questions to me. Fair is fair. The most common one was how to customize Google News to fit their needs. In particular, how do you add a custom news section.

The problem in trying to answer this question is customization by definition, tends to be personal. What one person watches is likely to be different from everyone else. However, I'll cover some general issues with the service.

The big draw for Google's customized news section is convenience. Although the service doesn't offer the precision of others, many people prefer having all news items appear on one page. Other people said they disliked email alerts. Regardless of your preference, Google News searches for stories matching your keywords in the last 30 days from its list of 4500 sources.

To add a custom news section to Google News,

1. Go to http://news.google.com/

2. Click the link labeled Personalize this page. It should be on the right side. When you click the link, the box expands showing more options.

3. Click the link labeled Add a custom section.

4. Click the Advanced link to the right of the textbox. The Advanced section allows other features such as labeling the news section. If you don't provide a label, Google will create one based on your keywords.

5. Enter in your Keywords and Label.

6. Click the Add section button.

7. You can repeat this process for other sections. Google does set a limit of 20 sections.

After you've added your custom section, you should see the name in the section listing on the left side of Google. Next to the Top Stories section, you'll see a menu option has been added for Customized News. Moreover, some of the stories will start to feed into the ancillary stories in the top left section.

Tweaking the Google News Query

Depending on your keywords, you may find that your results are slightly off the mark. This isn't unusual and can be fixed using some of Google's operators. Operators are symbols that you add to the keywords to refine your search. The most common ones are:

Operator	Meaning
+	include this term
-	exclude this term
~	similar terms
|	OR

To put this in perspective, we'll use a request we received from a survey respondent. He wished to follow a company called Butterfield & Robinson.

Many people start their query by entering the company name without the punctuation. Google isn't case sensitive so you don't have to worry about capitalization.

Keywords entered: butterfield robinson

As you can see from the screen below, these keywords are pulling stories regardless of where the keyword appears. Butterfield could be in the first paragraph and Robinson could be at the end. As far as we can tell, the custom section search doesn't allow you to do exact phrase searches.

Update 05/09/05 - we received an email from the Google Team that this problem is now fixed and you can use quotes.

If we add the ampersand as part of the keyword string, our results become more relevant. To include the ampersand as a searchable item we need to precede it with the + sign.

Keywords entered: butterfield +& robinson

Sometimes there are multiple companies with this name. To be on the safe side, you might add a qualifier pertaining to the type of business. In this case, our friend indicated the company is in the travel business.

We could append the term "travel" to the end of our query. However, you may want to experiment with using synonyms by adding a tilde. The tilde instructs Google to look for similar terms such as "tour".

Keywords entered: butterfield +& robinson ~travel

Alternatively, if you noticed stories for an accounting firm with the same name you could add the exclude operator, which is a minus sign.

Keywords entered: butterfield +& robinson -accounting

Tip: Google saves your Google News setting in a cookie. If you decide to remove your cookies, your custom searches will disappear. To protect your settings, you can click the link labeled "share your customized news with a friend". A pop box will appear with a URL that maps to your settings. You can either mail the URL to yourself or bookmark that link.

Additional Resources

• Google News
• About Google News Help Page

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