Create a section for your city, state, or country on your personalised Google News page and you will get local articles written in, around, or about that place.

To see it, visit Google News and find the section named "Local News". Type in your location, and click on "Add". Now you'll get coverage of what's happening in your town from news sources around the world.

You can also create a custom section using a keyword. Use this feature to track sports, specific politicians, or hot button issues.

Researching a topic that was covered years or even decades ago? Google News archive search makes it easy to search and explore historical archives like those from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.

Browse the most relevant articles, or get a historical overview of the results from an automatically created timeline. Try searching for harbour bridge opening, man on moon, or the plague.

Curious what opinions or statements someone's been making publicly in the news? Now when you search for a person's name in Google News, you'll see quotes from them above the search results. Clicking on the person's name will show you more recent quotes. For example, see quotes from Kevin Rudd, Stephen Conroy, and Kyle Sandilands.  

With Google Alerts you can set up a personal, automated web searcher to help keep you up to date. You provide it with a query and your email address, and it will email you when it finds new results for your search terms.

Google Alerts can be configured to search the web, news, blogs and more, and check continuously or just once a day or week. Use it to keep tabs on your beat, your favorite celebrity or sports team, to track a company, or even to monitor events in your community.