News 

Coinciding with the release of the Mac version, the PC release of Google Earth came out of beta this month. And following on from the portal-like Google Desktop, which came out of beta at the end of last year, the well-received news aggregation service, Google News, has now formally entered full service.

A couple of new features mark Google News leaving beta. First, Google has introduced what it calls 'personalized news headlines' - by integrating Personalized Search into Google News, users can receive recommended news stories based on their past news searches and articles.

Also, there's a new section in the left-hand column, 'Most Popular', which shows the most popular recent stories in the Google News edition you are viewing (as well as news.google.com there is a UK-specific version, for example).

You can read more about Google News and how its topic-clustering algorithms work at news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_google_news.html.

Created by Krishna Bharat in September 2002, the declared objective of Google News was to provide a broader perspective on current news stories, encouraging readers to browse multiple articles on a topic instead of just one.

The fully automated service has grown to cover 22 regional editions in 10 languages.