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Google News Adds Custom Category Tracking Feature

Google makes a big deal about some of their upgrades, changes, and projects, but other updates often fly in under the radar. These small enhancements may not be newsworthy to Google, but they’re often useful to those taking advantage of Google services. Such is the case with a recent update to Google News — an update that received no mentions anywhere on Google blogs or sites.

It was caught by our friends at Search Engine Land, however, and was verified by an official Google representative thereafter. The change itself is fairly simple: users now have more ability to customize their home page view, show or hide news categories, and (most importantly) create and track their own categories.

You can create a category by conducting any news search as you normally would. A new option will now be at the top of the page, right above the news stories, which lets you “follow” the news stories with a single click. Doing this will change this search into one of your news categories on the Google News home page, and will import stories from the category to your home page feed. You an also create more advanced custom categories that include multiple search terms.

This has more than one implication. For those of you who find yourselves visiting the news site day after day, typing in the same queries to pull up data, the seemingly minor update provides a way to both save time and view more top stories at a glance. However, this is also an excellent resource for businesses. From a PR perspective, the ability to have a category that includes all the major terms for your business makes this one of the best ways to track your company mentions in the public eye.

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Rob D Young

Rob has been insatiably obsessed with Google, search engine technology, and the trends of the web-based world since he began ...

Google News Adds Custom Category Tracking Feature

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