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Search the Latest News On Google

The search engine Google is currently beta testing a service that lets you search the latest news stories. The Google News Search sifts through the past week's news from magazines and newspapers around the world.

The News Search is located at http://news.google.com/ . When you access the page, you get an overview of the news divided into the following categories:

Ÿ     Headline News

Ÿ     World News

Ÿ     US News

Ÿ     Business News

Ÿ     Entertainment News

Ÿ     Technology News

Ÿ     Sports News

The Google Search box lets you search through the past week of news from the magazines and newspapers which Google has indexed. I wasn't able to find the list of sources being searched, but from the results I viewed, I'm assuming it's similar to the list on the Google News and Resources page (the Google News and Resources page gives a directory of news sources. The Google News Search searches through these sources -- or a subset of these sources).

When you search, the Google News Search uses a unique grouping technology to place related stories together in the same search result. For example, I did a search for basketball and got the following results:

The stories about the Boston / New Jersey game were grouped under one heading. The stories about the Los Angeles / Sacramento game were grouped under another. This lets you quickly view the headlines, and lets you read multiple accounts of a story from different news sources.

The grouping technology is not yet perfect, but I found that it worked remarkably well... and I found it very useful. Google plans to add more news sources and to update the index more frequently (it's currently updated multiple times during the day). I'd like to see them list the sources they search, and I'd also like the ability to search more than just the previous week of articles. But despite my wishes, the current News Search is a fast, useful way to search authoritative sources for the latest news stories.

Phil