Google News, as Local as Can Be

The Google News team always hurried with their predictions about features being implemented and mostly they were right. Some minor exceptions don't count, like the fact that they won't check for updates if they are included in the same article and will only present the original story, no matter how many additions and reviews have happened. But what's done is done and there's no point in complaining about the obvious.

Google News gave today a new meaning to the concept of "Local" that they had considered this far. "We're releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code. While we're not the first news site to aggregate local news, we're doing it a bit differently - 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," software engineers, Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna, of the team have posted on the official Google News blog.

The earlier updates of the algorithm will, of course, continue working amid the changes happening, so even if multiple sources, both from where the story happened and abroad, happen to report the same thing, the most importance will have the ones closer to ground zero. If that's not promoting local news, I don't know what is.

At the moment, this update will only work for the English versions of the News site, but the team hopes to have it up and running, in the near future, for the sites all over the world. Looking forward to that happening!