Explore Google News | Google Power Tools Bible

Point your Web browser to http://news.google.com to begin viewing Google News. You can also navigate to the news page by clicking the News link on the Google search page. As mentioned earlier, Google News is an aggregator of news. This means that Google gathers news articles from different news sources and redisplays it. Not all the articles from all 4,500 news sources are displayed. When you first launch the Google News Web site you are shown the Standard News version. This version displays the top news stories from around the world. This page is automatically generated on a regular basis. You can even see how long it has been since the page was auto-generated by looking in the top-right corner of the News page, where the length of time since the last page was generated appears.

Navigating through the news

A short abstract of each news story appears with its title as a clickable hyperlink. In addition to the story brief, links to additional related stories appear beneath the abstract. Usually, the first two are links to stories and other news sources carrying a related story.

Note

Clicking the links to related news sources will cause you to navigate away from Google News. To return to the Google News page, click the Back button in your browser.

View the full story by clicking either the title of the story or the small thumbnail image that appears with each story, as shown in Figure 14.1.

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Figure 14.1: Click the title link or thumbnail to view the full story.

Menu surfing

Each section of Google News can be accessed using the menu along the left side of the Google News page. By default, when you first load Google News, the Top Stories menu selection is highlighted. Clicking the various menu choices reloads the page with the new selected news stories. Your choices are:

Top Stories: Main news stories of the moment
World: Top stories from many countries around the world
[Country]: Menu selection changes based on the country you select (see News in Your Language)
Business: Top business and economic stories of the day
Sci/Tech: Top science and technology stories
Sports: Stories about athletes, games, and sports contests
Entertainment: News about movies, television, live productions, and performers
Health: Top advances in medicine, drug therapies, treatments, and world health stories
Most Popular: Displays the stories most selected by other readers in order from most read to least read

The menu appears while viewing any of the Google News pages. Also in the left menu are links to news alerts, news feeds, and mobile news, which are covered later in this chapter.

Other news sections

By default, abstracts from the top 20 World news, Sports, U.S. (or the country you have configured), Business, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, and the Most Popular stories are displayed. You can scroll down the page viewing each of the brief stories. Just like the main Google News page, each story lists the source of the story and links to related news stories. The Most Popular stories are rated by the number of people who have clicked on the abstracts to open the full text of the articles.

Each section is configurable so that you can choose to see more or fewer stories in that section. At the end of each section there are links, Show more stories, and Show fewer stories. Click these links to view Google News the way you want to see it.

News in your language

Select the country you want to view from the Top Stories drop-down list along the top of the Google News page. Selecting a new country displays headlines associated with the country you select. The world headlines often change with the country setting but may remain the same.

When selecting a new country, the language most associated with that country is used to display the Web page. In countries like India that have multiple languages but where English is the dominant language, news articles are displayed in English.

When using Internet Explorer, Google automatically senses the language your browser has set as the default language and shows you the news for that area of the world. Not only are the news articles displayed in the language you have set in your browser, Google displays different news articles that it believes will interest you based on the language you speak.

To change the language set in your Internet Explorer Web browser, follow these steps:

From the menu, choose Tools Internet Options.
In the Internet Options dialog box, click Languages, which is located along the bottom of the dialog box.
If the language you want to use is not displayed, click Add. Select a language and click OK.
When the language you want to use is listed, or you added it in step 3, click once on the language to highlight it (see Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2: Move the language you want to use for your pages to the top of the list.
Click Move Up until the language you want to use is at the top of the list.
Click OK once in the Language Preference dialog box and again in the Internet Options dialog box to complete the language change.

Caution

Changing the default language changes the language for all Web pages you visit. Some Web pages are only accessible by people viewing in a particular language. For example, America Online’s www.aim.com can only be viewed using the U.S. English language. Viewers using other languages are redirected.

Google does not sense the Firefox browser language setting. You can refer to the Firefox help for more information about setting the default language settings. The steps are similar to Internet Explorer except you find the language settings among the Advanced option settings.

At the bottom of each Google News page is a list of the different international versions of Google News. You can select an international version by clicking the link associated with the name of the country, and news is displayed in the primary language of that country.

Search Google News

A Google Search text box appears at the top of the Google News page. This allows you to search through all the articles within Google News, past and present (sorry not the future yet) and whether the news article appears displayed in your Web browser or not.