If you use your smart phones to get your daily dose of current affairs from Google News, then you are in luck. You can now tune in to more local news aside from location based news; you will also be treated to new news features as well as numerous custom settings.

The first of the bunch is the News near You feature. With this feature, you can get to receive news that is relevant to your immediate surroundings or geographical location.

When you visit the site on your phone, you will be asked if you want to share your location. If you click yes, you can now take advantage of the News near You feature. Normally, you will find this at the bottom of the page but you can personalize its position. If you want to hide this feature, just click on the “Hide” button or you can all together remove this feature by turning off the “Enable Location.”Go to the Mobile Browser Settings.

If you are bugged by the news refresh feature of Google News, you can also opt out of that feature. If you do not like tom refresh the news content every 15 minutes, click on the Gear icon and then choose “News Settings” and from there, you can tick the box off the feature that allows the page to reload every 15 minutes. If you want strict news and not blog posts or press releases, you can opt out that content as well. However, do not expect that it will be perfect. Google should polish up their filters so that all blog and press releases can be removed from the settings where you prefer to receive NONE of them. Nonetheless, these features are ideally good for those who only want to personalize the page and make it more functional for their tastes.