[thelist] Google News Search

[Simon Willison]

Anyone else been playig with Google's new "News Search" feature?

<quote source="http://news.google.com/help/about_news_search.html">
Google's News Search (BETA) service presents information culled from
many of the world's news sources collected over the previous week. With
continuous updates throughout the day, you'll keep up to date with
what's happening now and learn about the stories that led to the most
recent developments.

What's different about Google's News Search is the unique grouping
technology Google has developed to automatically put related stories
together in the same search result. This makes it easy to quickly scan
the headlines while providing the option of reading multiple accounts of
a story from different news sources.
</quote>

I've been using it recently and it's excellent - stick in a search term
(for example "Euro Disney") and the search enginer returns all recent
stories, grouped into similar coverage (giving you links to various
different news site's coverage of the same story) along with how long
ago they were posted.

Looks like another step by Google into the portal market, but at least
they're keeping it search orientated.

<tip type="Mozilla Browser" author="Simon Willison">
Mozilla (and presumably Netscape 6 though I haven't tried it) can assign
shortcut terms to bookmarks. Select a bookmark in the bookmark manager
and hit "properties", then type something in the "keyword" field. You
can now jump straight to that bookmark by entering that keyword in the
location bar. Even better, you can add query string abilities to your
bookmarks by placing a %s in the URL saved with the bookmark. For
example, the following bookmark allows me to type "news enron" and have
Mozilla load up the google news search results page for "enron" as a query:

http://news.google.com/news?q=%s <-- add this bookmark and set the
keyword to "news"
</tip>