Now that Google has introduced customization to Google News, the temptation to compare it to Yahoo! News's personalization features is irresistable. The manner in which the two services allow themselves to be customized reveals differences in their styles of news presentation.

Both Google and Yahoo! allow reordering of major news sections, as well as user choice of which sections appear at all. Google is more flexible when it comes to headline volume; Yahoo! allows three or five headlines to appear in a section, oddly withholding any other choices. Google shines by allowing custom section-building, which amounts to setting up customized searches. Google has been doing something similar for a while with its e-mailed News Alerts, but I'd rather not get my Inbox involved. By configuring keyword news searches, I can get hit Google News often for quickk updates in fields of interest.

Yahoo!'s approach is more cosmetic, offering the standard three-hue color alterations used in My Yahoo!. While both Google and Yahoo! are clunky in the customization department, and could offer much more granular adjustments of news sources, Yahoo! provides much finer choices in My Yahoo! than in Yahoo! News. For news configuration, My Yahoo! is the place to go. There, you can select individual news sources and control headline volume more precisely.

My Yahoo! also offers robust RSS support, which Google News doesn't go anywhere near (neither does Yahoo! News).

So the smart choices boil down to these: My Yahoo! for configurable pushed news, and Google News's customized sections (really saved searches) for configurable pulled news.