Marketing Pilgrim

Google News just added a neat new feature that can help you keep track of news that’s of interest to you, alongside the rest of the day’s regular news item.

Clicking the new “Add a Section” link brinks up the following page that allows you to add pre-programmed news modules, or build your own. When you build your own, you’ll be presented with the following options:

Section title: The title of your section. This will appear in your Personalized Google News Homepage.

Search terms: Keywords that define your section. Be relevant and creative, and be sure to separate your keywords with a comma. For example, if you’re interested in news about entrepreneurship, you may want to include several phrases such as “startup”, “entrepreneur”, “venture capital” and “innovation.” We make it easier for you to enter these phrases as you type by suggesting related keywords to add.

Edition: Language edition of Google News from which your articles will be selected. For example, a “Football” section with the US as the preferred edition will look very different from one with UK as the preferred edition.

Source location (optional): Restrict to sources from a particular geographic location. For example, if you are interested in the real estate market in Ireland, you could add a restriction to only show news from Irish sources. This is an optional field and nothing needs to be entered. Currently we allow restricting only at the state level within the US or at the country-level outside the US.

The new section will then get added to your personalized Google News homepage and will look something like this one I created for PubCon news:

I was going to recommend this as a way to add reputation monitoring to your Google News page, but after testing, I discovered that the new module is somewhat limited–you can’t include exact matches or negative keywords. So, you’ll just have to stick with Google Alerts or Trackur.

PS. From what I can tell, you have to view your Personalized Google News homepage, before you can see the “Add a Section” link.

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