Embed Custom Google News on Your Website
Another cool new feature from Google today: the ability to create a Google News slideshow that you can embed on your own website. The company has launched the NewsShow wizard that lets you pick a search expression (“social media” in the example below), a search topic (like “technology”), and specify a few design options.
From there, the Google NewsShow is just copy and paste iframe code. The NewsShow documentation details all of the attributes that you can tweak if you have some familiarity with JavaScript. While I love the concept of leveraging the Google News algorithms to build your own aggregator, the execution falls a bit short, at least in this initial release.
The primary issue is with the display itself – the slideshow format gives NewsShow the mundane look and feel of a slideshow widget. What I’d rather have is simply a customizable number of headlines about a given topic, in a size that I can specify (currently, the only options are 728×90 and 300×250, two popular banner ad sizes), that displays as static links. Perhaps some custom color attributes too for backgrounds, headlines, and story descriptions that match the look and feel of my site.
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