Google News announced this week that you can now put Google News — limited by search queries — on your Web site. (They’re calling it NewsShow.) For you codeheads, there’s a post about it on the Google AJAX APIs blog, but if you don’t want to bother with that there’s also wizard for generating your own code.

I went and checked out the wizard. If you’ve ever used content wizards before, some this will look familiar — you can specify what the content will look like and how many articles it’ll show. But you can also specify what edition of Google News you want to use (basically what country/language) and what topic(s) you want to search (top news, business, sports, health, politics, etc.) You don’t have to check any topics if you don’t want, because you can also specify a search query.

Doing some experiments, I found that I could use Google News’ special syntax, but when I tried to do giant super long searches, the NewsShow wizard threw up. That being said, I was able to have luck with some long searches; this query worked fine:

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one

It was when I started trying to add a lot of sources that the NewsShow wizard decided to be uncooperative.

So, so what? Personally I would make the most of the wizard with special syntax: this would be great for tracking local news and perhaps source news (or a group of sources.) I had some success with making sets of local headlines; to really depress yourself try intitle:layoffs location:ca.

If you want to learn more about syntax in Google News try my articles Following University Information With Google News and Follow 17 Press Release Wires With Google News. Have fun!