Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Google News Gadget

Google released a gadget showing stories aggregated through Google News. This gadget can be included on the iGoogle homepage, or if you grab the embed code, on other webpages. You can customize the edition that shows (US, France, German etc.) – as well as the topic tabs (from top stories to US to sports or health). If you’re using this on iGoogle, you can also enter a topic of your own choice, say, the keywords “comic book”... though this part of the customization is not offered when you create the embed code, unfortunately.

Update & edit: As opposed to what Google stated in their official blog on the subject, this gadget is not new. I changed this post’s title from “New Google News Gadget” to “Google News Gadget”. [Thanks Ionut!]

Below is an example of the gadget in action (there’s also a screenshot).

However, this isn’t the first Google News widget – it’s not even the first News widget created by Google. For one thing, you can turn any site’s RSS or Atom feed into a gadget on iGoogle. Just pick the feed of choice, including e.g. the Google News RSS feed that can be customized to keywords, and on iGoogle click Add stuff -> Add by URL. Plus, there is an older gadget named Google News Customized – again, letting you run it based on your own keyword –, though the latter won’t work on webpages. There’s also a recommended news gadget by Google. Plus, there’s a mobile version of Google News, and just like with other mobile-optimized pages, you can turns this into a gadget with only little XML.

[Via official Google News blog.]

Google News Gadget by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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