Google News has finally left the beta stage. Other than the removal of the “beta” tag, it doesn’t look like much else has changed this time around.

Of course, Google News has seen a large number of changes since it was first released in September 2002. But why has it taken so long to leave beta?

Google News has been updated so that your customized news page is now tied to your Google Account rather than just a cookie. It’s taken them long enough to get this done.

This means you can now view Google News, the way that you want, regardless of what computer you are at. As I said, the past version of Google News relied on a cookie, and the only way to see the same thing on multiple computers was to pass a huge URL (250+ characters) around.

Also now that Google News is tied to your Google Account, you’ll find any news you search for archived in your Personal Search History.

Google News has been updated to allow users to get their Google News via RSS and Atom feeds.

You can get the feeds for the standard Google News, the main categories (World, U.S., Sports, etc), custom news sections, and even a specific news search.

More information about the new feature can be found in the “About Feeds and Terms of Use” section of Google News.

I just finished reinstalling Windows, and as I was waiting on WoW to finish installing I thought I’d stop by Google News to see what was going on in the world.

There on the Google News main page was a new box saying “Customize this page”. Looks like they’ve started adding some new stuff to Google’s other services now. You can drag and drop the categories to have Google News displayed the way you want. You can also add custom sections, such as “Mozilla” or “Overclockers Club”. More information on the new customize feature can be found here.

It’s a pretty nice idea if you ask me. Only problem is, I can’t get the blasted thing to work.

Also added to Google News is a new Text Version.

Well, by the time it was all said and done, we ended up with 10,652 people in the forums at one time. That meant that after people came to OCC from Google News that they came into the forums.

Google’s come out with some rather nice stuff over the years. If I’ve found anything more useful than the main search it would have to be Google News.

Not only has it been a great way to find out what’s going on in the world, but it has also been a huge help at getting people to OverclockersClub.com. Take today for example, we ended up with two main page news stories. This actually gave us a total of 3 links off of Google News’ main index. That directed a ton of traffic to OCC.

I’ll be honest, while OCC is a popular site, we usually hit a max of about 1,000 people online at a given time. Most of the time it’s less than that. Today, thanks mainly to Google News (though there were other sites involved) we hit over 8,000 people online (as of right now). See what I mean, it’s generated a hell of a lot of traffic. :p It has also got people talkingM.