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All News is Local

A new featue available from Google is localized news. What does your local news box look like? Some of the local news aggregated is a little off - giving news for areas a few hours away.

 

How good is the clustering of local news? The top story is So what'cha want ... to do tonight? from the Los Angeles Times.The blog is about high schools across the southland - and not about the local area. The next story is about Butte County. Butte is only 350 miles north of where I live. Finally, another cluster is around local propositions and bond measures. Again, the articles are from sites on the other side of the mountains.  

 

Between the lines blogs, "In the end, I found that Google News isn’t nearly as local as it needs to be. Perhaps it needs to take the Yahoo approach and partner with the local newspapers so it can have the content sources to populate Google News." - So - I must not be the only one finding the news not to be local.

 

Maybe there is nothing interesting in my local area, did Google do better for you?

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Comments

Re: All News is Local

I checked, and I quite liked it. Google got it right, pretty much mirroring the local paper that I read at my dad's this morning. The only thing Google missed is the snow emergency the state is having, and I guess that's not really local to Boise, although it's making the news here because we're affected too.

One story that made Google's news for my area was a biggie (locally) that just broke 2 hours ago. I like having the world, national, and local news available on the same page. I think Google does it again.
Submitted by SGR on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 03:09.

Re: All News is Local

Haa! I spoke too soon. Now they have the snow story. Very .. um .. cool!
Submitted by SGR on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 04:09.

Re: All News is Local

Quote:
Originally Posted by SGR View Post
Haa! I spoke too soon. Now they have the snow story. Very .. um .. cool!
You are lucky. The difference might be the keywords Google is using for certain areas. The more populated areas would be difficult to decipher if the story is local. They get kudos for trying and hopefully they'll tweak the algorithm and it'll get better and better.
Submitted by LPH on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 13:49.

Re: All News is Local

Since you wrote about this and I checked it out, I've been glancing at it every now and then.

I just appreciate the whole Google approach. It's clean. No frills--just what you're asking for. They don't even have lots of colors jumping at you. I guess I'm saying that it's almost a restful look. Google News just lists the news stories with a tiny teaser. If you want more, you can get it. I like it.
Submitted by SGR on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 21:17.

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