The most solid overall news site on the web right now is Google news. It automatically serves up the day's top stories in eight sections that range from world headlines to sports. You can personalize the results and even request e-mail alerts for specific events.

Google News gathers stories from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, and automatically arranges them to present the most relevant news first. Topics are updated every 15 minutes, so you're likely to see new stories each time you check the page. Pick the item that interests you and you'll go directly to the site which published that story.

Next is the Yahoo! News. It has a "Most Popular" feature where news stories are ranked based on the number of times subscribers have e-mailed them to friends which is not a bad way to keep up with the latest buzz.

Digg is currently the hottest site for the more technically inclined. Subscribers judge the newsworthiness of submitted stories by giving them a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down'. The stories with the most votes bubble up to the top of the list.

Other useful news sites are CNN (breaking news), BBC (international news), and Reuters (business news).

Google Homepage users can take advantage of the Newsreel Google Gadget that automatically retrieves and scrolls headlines from a variety of news sources.