Google Unveils (Sometimes Curious) ?News Near You?

Google has long let you look up local businesses on its mobile search page, leveraging the location services features on smartphones. Friday, they added local news.

The address is the same ? news.google.com ? and the sources are those already available via Google News. But now you are prompted to agree to share your location, rather than punch in a zip code or locale name on the personalized landing page.

For me, in Times Square, the top hits came from various New York newspapers, which makes perfect sense. What made no sense was that the top ?news near me? story was a? New York Times story headlined ?A Common Thread Dominates Table Tennis.?

I?m guessing the ?news near me? idea works a lot better in less media-rich market ? where there are fewer headlines to choose from and local news is really pothole and garden-gnome-theft oriented, because there is no way this ping-pong story is the talk of The Big Apple. It doesn?t even register on the Time?s own top e-mailed or blogged lists.

On the plus side, the discovery engine doesn?t just leverage your location to tap into local sources for news, it also find stories about your location from publications that aren?t near you. Included in my ?nearby news? was a New York event covered by a national magazine and a California newspaper. ?We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every?story to understand what location the news is about and where the?source is located,? Google said on its mobile blog.

Also good: This HTML5 web page is super fast, and is utterly configurable except that you can?t bury ?Top News? (a real boon to those of us who don?t want sports or health headlines extending our vertical scroll). And because It?s not an app it is available to any phone that can surf the web. and is available via the browser of any Android smartphone or iPhone.

The big question is: What took so long? Location-based news was first available in 2008, and it doesn?t seem like anything needed to be invented to introduce this feature.

I guess the answer to that could be found by traveling near Google?s Silicon Valley headquarters and turning on the new local news feature.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/google-curious-news-near-you/

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