Google News Goes Local

by Jarrett Martineau | February 7, 2008 at 09:04 am

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Respected tech bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and others have been speaking about the importance of the 'hyperlocal' and 'hyperpersonal' for quite a while. For the most part their attention has been focused on the untapped billions of potential advertising revenue buried in sites that concentrate on local markets and information. So, for any companies that are invested and interested in the local news and/or news aggregation business, today's Google announcement is a key competitive development:

Google News is working hard to either kill your local newspaper or make you read it more often. While Google News has typically gathered the top stories from news sources across the web and presented the top world and national stories, you can now get local pages for pretty much any major city.

All you have to do is visit the Google News homepage, scroll down the page a bit until you see a box asking for a city, state, or zip code. Fill in the box, and Google will add a local section to the page. You can also click the hyperlink to get a standalone page.

Google News has a new feature: custom localized news. Just visit the Google News homepage and scroll down to the “Local News” input box. Enter your location, click Add, and you’ll find a new navigation entry in the top left. [...]

Google claims that while they’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, they’re “doing it a bit differently”:

[W]e’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.