Put an RSS subscribe button next to search results where applicable. Then let me browse my Google news feeds in a gmail-like interface, or as an additional search page like the “Desktop” page.

You could even use a local engine, like the great Google Desktop engine.

Update: Scott posted a comment with the following great advice:

You can actually hack Google to give yourself this feature. You need: 1. Firefox 2. The Greasemonkey extension (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/) 3. The Annotate Google script (http://ponderer.org/annotate_google_redux)

Which is great for the 1% of Firefox users (who comprise around 5-20% of web users, depending on who you ask) who have Greasemonkey.

Still, that’s a cool hack.