I have been a great fan of Google News for a few years now. So much so that I read most news starting here rather than through news papers or their websites. . A big lacuna with it was that Tamil news was not covered in this channel. With Google Seithigal, Tamil newspapers will be indexed and covered. Basic details about this service are available in its help section. Here are a few additional tips.
Getting news from across newspapers in one place
Given that the news industry in Tamil Nadu is highly politicised, it is useful to read the same news in different newspapers so that we can get a more balanced view. Google News makes this easy. To do so for Tamil papers, select “India edition” in Google News or go directly to news.google.co.in (rather than dot com). When you are in the India edition, you will see the Tamil option on the top. Once you click that, you will get Tamil news arranged by topics. This will present news from a wide range of Tamil newspapers in one place.
Searching Google Seithigal
The best feature of Google News is that you can search for news on topics of interest and aggregate it from all newspapers in one place. This works very well in English, but not in Tamil for a rather silly reason: There is no interface to type in Tamil. I don’t know why they do not provide this interface, and I hope this will be added soon. In the meanwhile, you can go to any online Tamil converter (click here for one), type your query there, copy it and paste it in the search box. Google also provides a transliteration tool where you can type in Roman characters and get the output in Tamil. You can download the “Transliteration IME” here. This will allow you to type in Tamil whenever you want easily, and you can also install nearly 14 Indian languages, among others using this tool.
Hindi, English, Tamil all in a page
The most exciting feature that Google News has added is the ability to add news from various languages in one customized page. When this started, it was possible to add major sections (e.g. politics) from the English, Hindi and Tamil editions to the personalize page, but that does not work smoothly with the recent changes in Google News. Instead, you can add customized sections with the keywords you are looking for by going to Edit > Advanced > create your own section. When you create your own section, type the keywords using Indian language characters that you want to get news in that language. The same goes for Hindi and other languages.
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