February 7th, 2008
Get your local news on Google News
A new feature on Google News lets you add a new section that pulls only local news for the location you specify. This new feature works very well — it just took a couple of seconds for me to add a new section to my homepage and sidebar. Here’s how to set it up.
First, load up Google News by clicking here. Once that loads up, you should now see a new section around the middle of the page that asks you to enter your location in a text box.
Type in a location, and click the button. At this point, it will fill in that box with local news headlines, and it will also create a brand new sidebar item that will give you a more complete view of what’s happening near you.
Google is taking a bit of a different approach to finding local news — they aren’t just simply looking at the source, like other similar services. Instead, they have decided to analyze the contents of news articles to try and figure out, more accurately, what locations this article is relevant for.
we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
Google states that this is still an experiment, so that’s the reason it is only available in English, but I have no doubt it will be expanded to other languages as soon as possible.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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