Interesting idea. Google makes a kind of subject-oriented page whenever there's a major story, and you can visit that page for updates. So you go to the "Tiger Woods Infidelity Scandal" (my label) page and then follow updates from there. You don't have to scour the Google News front page for updates, or wait for email updates. They've got some pretty clever ideas going on on these pages, including summaries and timelines showing when each aspect of the story appeared in the media.

 

Unfortunately all of the entries (and in fact all of the stories on the page) come from the same source, which is a sponsor for the page. (So far it's just the New York Times and the Washington Post, and one article I read speculated that Fox News' exclusion is deliberate and a snub based on the recent flap over Fox and Microsoft teaming up to try and charge Google for stories.)

 

I think Google may be shooting itself in the foot with this one. Because it's single-source, any news agency, especially one with a sophisticated web site (say, Fox News?) could pick up this idea and run with it themselves and have exactly the same feature set as Google's pages, plus full control over the content. I'm completely at a loss as to why Google would restrict this to single sources like that -- it defeats the whole purpose of aggregated news search. But hey, what do I know.

 

This YouTube video explains the system pretty well.

 

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I read in the Times that this was an experiment between NYT, the Post, and Google, and that it will be opened up to other media sources in the future if it works out. Could be rather nifty.

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