Google News enables stars to help users track breaking stories

If you read your news in feed form, you're likely familiar with Google Reader's "star" feature. You can click a star to save a story for later, and use your star list for quick reference. Google News has finally added something similar for those who read their news the old-fashioned way. Starring a story adds it to your "starred" menu, accessible via the sidebar, and causes any updates to appear in bold.

Users can only star 20 items at a time, which is a bit of a bummer, but it makes sense. Saving stories for posterity is what Google Reader is for. Google News is better-suited for following breaking headlines, and it's tough to follow more than 20 of those at once. It will be interested to see if Google builds more features around saving, organizing and sharing starred items on Google News, though.

Tags: bookmark, google news, GoogleNews, news, save, star, starred-items, stories