27. A non-transitory computer-readable memory device containing instructions for execution by one or more processors, the instructions comprising: one or more instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to: crawl news content documents hosted by a plurality of news source servers; fetch news content from the crawled news content documents; index the fetched news content to produce indexed news content; divide a news document into a plurality of news sections, the plurality of news sections being capable of being displayed at a same time when the customized news document is rendered, each news section of the plurality of news sections corresponding to a different search query; receive a plurality of personalized search queries from a user; identify a number of news items to include in each news section of the plurality of news sections; identify a user-specified manner of ranking news items in each news section; search the indexed news content based on a personalized search query, of the plurality of personalized search queries, to obtain a first set of related news items; identify selected news items, of the first set of related news items, corresponding to the identified number of news items for a particular news section of the plurality of news sections; rank the selected news items based on the identified user-specified manner of ranking; and populate only the particular news section, of the plurality of news sections of the news document, with the ranked news items.
27. A non-transitory computer-readable memory device containing instructions for execution by one or more processors, the instructions comprising: one or more instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to: crawl news content documents hosted by a plurality of news source servers; fetch news content from the crawled news content documents; index the fetched news content to produce indexed news content; divide a news document into a plurality of news sections, the plurality of news sections being capable of being displayed at a same time when the customized news document is rendered, each news section of the plurality of news sections corresponding to a different search query; receive a plurality of personalized search queries from a user; identify a number of news items to include in each news section of the plurality of news sections; identify a user-specified manner of ranking news items in each news section; search the indexed news content based on a personalized search query, of the plurality of personalized search queries, to obtain a first set of related news items; identify selected news items, of the first set of related news items, corresponding to the identified number of news items for a particular news section of the plurality of news sections; rank the selected news items based on the identified user-specified manner of ranking; and populate only the particular news section, of the plurality of news sections of the news document, with the ranked news items. 31. The non-transitory computer-readable memory device of claim 27 , the instructions further comprising: one or more instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to identify one or more preferences for certain kinds of news sources for the news content, where the instructions that cause the one or more processors to search the news content based on the personalized search query include one or more instructions that cause the one or more processors to search the news content based on the one or more preferences.