Google News Reader, Read Custom News In Chrome

Martin Brinkmann
May 24, 2012
Google Chrome, Google Chrome extensions
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Computer users have many options when it comes to reading news. From the traditional way of visiting portal sites like Yahoo or newspaper websites like the New York Times site, to aggregators like Reddit or Hacker News, to forums or RSS.

Google News is an aggregator that is collecting news articles from around the world to make them available as excerpts with links pointing to the source. Not every website is included into Google News as sites need to meet certain standards for a chance to be included into the Google News program. The benefit for site owners is that Google News can drive extra traffic - that is usually time-limited - to websites included in the program.

Google News Reader for the Google Chrome browser is an official extension that can display news in the browser directly.  The extension adds a single icon to Chrome's address bar that you can click on to display news headlines.

Before you do that, you may want to open the preferences first to select topics that you are interested in. A right-click on the icon and the selection of options from the context menu opens the configuration screen.

It allows you to..

  • change the target country for the news. A click on the pulldown menu displays dozens of countries that are supported besides the U.S. If you want localized news, this is the setting you need to modify.
  • change the number of stories from five to a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 10.
  • enable or disable popular topics, including national, sports or technological news.
  • define up to 10 custom news topics that you are interested in

Google News Reader displays only one topic at a time in the news listing, which means that you may need to switch quite a bit depending on the number of topics that you monitor.

You can click on a topic to expand it in the popup, which displays an excerpt, additional news sources, and links pointing to those sources.

A click on a link opens the website the news was published on. The extension could use some polishing, for instance options to change font sizes, or a larger popup window that displays more news at once. Some users have also criticized Google for not synchronizing the setup with their custom Google account news setup. It is despite that a popular Chrome extension.

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