I was using google news http://www.google.com/news?ned=us
it even got better for a while when they let you get rid of the areas you didn't want, which to me was sports, and the Hollywood section.
HAL9000 put a huge amount of work into his news links page.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1639604/posts
I use http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
Google search engine without the user tracking and permanent search query storage. Did you know that every Google search you've ever done can be traced back to you?