Google Adds News Personalization

downbad writes "ZDNet is reporting that the Google News home page is now customizable, allowing you to add or delete main news categories (such as business, sports and so on), as well as increasing or decreasing the number of headlines within a section. They've also introduced a feature that lets you create your own section using keywords for a topic that interests you."

Comments

Being a mobile user I love the text only option...

[garcia]

Being that I'm a mobile web user most of the time I really appreciate the addition of text only news.google.com. It's not that the page didn't load fast enough as it was but the text only version is left justified and is rendered a lot better than it normally is.

While you can modify the layout to left justify almost everything now it still doesn't remove the "customize this page" box and a couple of stories (from Top Stories) on the right side. Oh well it's still in beta ;)

Support for Opera

[TheJavaGuy]

Customized news requires you to have both Javascript and cookies turned on. Your browser must be Internet Explorer 6.0 (or newer), Netscape 7.1 (or newer), Mozilla 1.4 (or newer), Firefox 0.8 (or newer), Opera 7.54 (or newer), or Safari 1.2.2 (or newer).

Wow, Google finally relased a product/update that works on the Opera browser. It took a long time for Google: Suggest, Maps, etc. to work properly on Opera.

Kudos to Google.

Diamond Age

[IceFox]

This reminds me of little tidbit from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Because "in the future" all the common people got high targeted newspapers containing stories that they would like and it was a sign of status to actually read the normal full New York Times rather then to only get the articles it knows you are interested in. Kinda like /. already. Those who read only /. eventually think that everyone reads /. and cares about issues that are on /.

-Benjamin Meyer