Google has moved its popular Google News search out of "beta" mode. Even though the service has been fully functional, Google has kept the news search in "beta" (or development) mode since its launch in September 2002. Google News gathers stories from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, automatically arranging search results to present the news most relevant to a submitted search first.

Results are compiled solely by Google's computer algorithms, without human intervention. As a result, news sources are selected "without regard to political viewpoint or ideology," enabling users to see how different news organizations around the world are reporting the same story. Topics are updated every 15 minutes.

Additionally, Google announced the introduction of personalized news headlines. By further integrating its Personalized Search into Google News, users can now receive recommended news stories based on their past Google News searches and articles they've read.

Users who want to receive personalized news headlines can sign up for Google's Personalized Search. Then, whenever they're signed in to their Google Account, they'll see recommended headlines based on what they've read in the past. These results appear along the left-hand column, but users can also get a full page of recommended stories - all generated automatically, similar to the book/product suggestions offered to returning shoppers at Amazon.com. Google has also introduced or improved a number of its News search features, including:

• Feeds: Users can receive updates of various sections of Google News or Google News search results by subscribing to RSS or Atom feeds in their preferred feed reader.
• Personalized news: With personalized news, users can build and share their own version of Google News by rearranging the sections on the Google News front page, or even creating new ones. For instance, users can put headlines about a company they're tracking or a useful office-management technology at the top of the page. Users can also get recommended headlines based on what news stories they've searched for and clicked on in the past.
• Trace story history: Users can trace the history of a topic or monitor an emerging story by clicking the "sort by date" option in their search results.
• Country-specific searching: The advanced news search gives users the option to limit their search to sources from a specific country.
• Source-specific searching: The advanced news search also gives users the option to limit their search to specific news sources.

 To read more about recent additions to Google's functionality, see these articles:

• Google Offers Free Web Traffic Statistics to Web Site Owners
• Google Offers Video Search
• Google Buys Blogger.com
• Google Enhances News Search
• Google Offers Catalog Searches
• Google Indexes Microsoft Office & Other File Types
• Google Indexes PDFs
• Google Adds Image Search
• Google Expands its People-Finder Capabilities