Google has launched its news search facility after months of testing. Officially still in beta mode, the purply-brown liveried Google News has a button on the launch page, which means gazillions will access the service.

Google News trawls 4,000 news sites, including The Register, and updates continuously. We like the way the news search engine aggregates stories on the same subject under one heading. Also Google has by definition a very good search engine which will be more useful than Newsnow, our favourite news aggregator, which restricts searches to one-word, headline-only. To the ordinary punter, Google News will also be much more useful than Moreover, the best known headline aggregator, which deliberately hobbles search to encourage sign-ups and pay-ups.

Medium-term, we guess, Google will offer headline news packages to corporates for use in intelligence and intranet publishing services. This is a challenge for the likes of Moreover, Tucow's Newshub and Newsnow. ®