Saturday, March 12, 2005

Google and Yahoo Change the Way We Get News

The world's most used search engine, Google, continues to offer innovations on all its products. This week, Google announced they are offering users new tools to customize the way they get their news.

Google News gathers news from over 4,500 sources. With the new tools, users of Google News can create customized pages on the site that gathers news stories from around the Web. Users can now prioritize existing news topics such as top stories, health, entertainment or sports to change the look of the site's front page. Users also can create new categories to capture news stories that contain certain key words.

According to Google, they are not trying to offer a personalized home page like those from Yahoo and MSN, which allow users to view news or information such as horoscopes or stock quotes and quickly connect to other services such as e-mail.

While Google News is available on mobile phones and handheld devices that can read Web pages, the new customization feature is not available to them yet...it is available only on personal computers.

But, in a related story, Yahoo announced that it has given its mobile users the ability to access all of their personalized My Yahoo headlines and the first part of related stories, including those that come from RSS and Atom feeds, on most mobile phones and handheld devices in the United States.

Some time ago, My Yahoo added support for open content syndication standards like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom, which allow users to receive content from sources such as news organizations and blogs.

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