36. A method comprising: crawling, by one or more processors and using a web robot, news content documents hosted by a plurality of news source servers; fetching, by one or more processors, news content from the crawled news content documents; indexing, by one or more processors, the fetched news content to produce indexed news content; dividing, by one or more processors, a news document into a plurality of news sections, each news section, of the plurality of news sections, being capable of being displayed at a same time when the customized news document is rendered; receiving, by one or more processors, a plurality of user search queries from a client device via a communication interface; identifying, by one or more processors, a user-specified manner of ranking news items within each news section of the plurality of news sections of the news document; identifying, by one or more processors, a number of news items to include in each news section; searching, by one or more processors, the indexed news content based on a user search query, of the plurality of user search queries, to obtain a first plurality of related news items; identifying, by one or more processors, selected news items, of the first plurality of related news items, corresponding to an identified number of news items associated with a first news section of the plurality of news sections; modifying, by one or more processors, a ranking of the selected news items based on a user-specified manner of ranking news items associated with the first news section; and populating, by one or more processors, only the first news section of the plurality of news sections of the news document with the selected news items.
39. The method of claim 36 , further comprising: searching the indexed news content based on a second user search query to obtain a second plurality of related news items; and populating only a second news section, of the plurality of news sections of the news document, with the second plurality of related news items.