TECHNOLOGY CORNER
Google News
As a news junkie, I used to spend my time scouring the various major news sites to find out what was going on. Now I simply bookmark Google News (http://news.google.com) and revisit it throughout the day. Whether it's the war in Iraq or other breaking news, this is the best place to get up-to-the-minute reports from 4,500 sites around the world. For example, the day after NBC's David Bloom died in Iraq, the site had links to more than 760 stories — from Business Week to the London Guardian to HiPakistan.com. This global perspective highlights how narrow and predictable some of the U.S. sites are. I use the "sort by date" option to trace how a story evolved over the past thirty days.
Stories are generated using Google's complex algorithms and, as the site says, "without human intervention." Among the factors it considers: where and how often the stories appear elsewhere on the Web. This lack of editors means that, occasionally, some of the story placements are not quite right, but I find that it's constantly improving. So when you are doing a Google search for a story, be sure to also visit the news section to get more timely results.
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