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Google gets into local news

Posted by Cory Bergman on February 7, 2008

You knew this was coming. Google News now allows you to localize a section of the stories. Scroll down just beneath the fold for the box to type in your city or zip code. I typed in Seattle, and a local news aggregation section appeared:

And that’s just the first two stories in the list. “This is pretty huge, folks, and it spotlights the need for everybody in the local news business to adopt best practices when it comes to unbundled distribution,” writes Terry Heaton. True enough, as Google News ranked #9 in Nielsen-Netratings for December — higher than USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.

  • Dave

    How is Google monetizing Google News? I haven’t seen any ads… even search based.

  • Z

    All the stories it pulled from my market were at least six hours old. The top story was posted yesterday afternoon.

  • Don Day

    Google News also seems to have a built in bias towards newspapers. Look at the screen grab — all paper stories… though the graphics come from TV…

  • http://www.allyourtv.com Rick Ellis

    Just glancing at Google’s efforts vs Topix, Google seems to do a slightly better job at relevance.

    But still, there is a lot of duplication and they seem to be using a flawed algorythm to select and organize the headlines. Even sorting by relevance or date brings up an odd mix of stories.

    There is some small value here, but honestly, I don’t think that any computer can do as good a job of selecting relevant content as even a single pair of human eyes.

  • discreet_chaos

    Yahoo! has had local news from local sources for years.

  • tdc

    the low cost producer of an abundance of content!

    they’ll monetize it, don’t worry.

  • http://www.howardowens.com/ Howard Owens

    I know Google put out some announcement about this … but I’ve had a local news feed on my Google news page for well more than a one year. From what I can see, nothing has changed.

    So I’m having a hard time seeing what the big deal is here.

  • http://westseattleblog.com TR

    Don – re: the newspaper bias – a side note on that: Our hyperlocal site covers a major city neighborhood that otherwise is served only by a weekly newspaper that seldom updates anything online between editions. We produce a near-deluge of stories short and long – clearly and accurately reported – each day and night, but Google has already turned us down once for inclusion in the “news” section rather than the “blogs” section. Meantime, Google News continues aggregating content from fluffy non-news reader blogs published by one local daily. If Google wants to own the news-aggregation space, it might be wise to consider not shunning hyperlocal news sites. (And if anyone knows of a hyperlocal site, not-newspaper-linked, whose content DOES come up in Google News, I’d love to hear about it.)

  • http://fultondailynews.com Dave

    I’m with Howard. I’ve had a feed on my Google News page for more than a year to track stuff in my hometown. I’m not sure that this changed anything, other than giving it an easy interface to set up.

    @TR: Agreed. Hyperlocal sites like ours get very little play from Google, even though we’re web independent. It’s not equivalent access to the search user.

  • http://www.allyourtv.com Rick Ellis

    As for the problem with hyperlocal site inclusion, I don’t know if it’s related, but Google News does seem to automatically shuffle anything written on any of the large blogging platforms to its “blog” index.

    For instance, I can write a headline for our front page that links to one of our internal blogs, and Google News will ignore it. But if I copy the story and post on a “normal” HTML page, it gets grabbed almost immediately.

    My problem with Google News is that it seems to randomly forget about our site every week or so, and won’t include anything new for about 24 hours. It must be some weird programming quirk.

  • John

    @TR: Just one example, but Dallas-based Pegasus News is a hyperlocal that is index and included in Google News results.

  • http://kwanzoo.com oakling

    TR: Seriously! Whenever I want to know what all the cops are doing or whether there was a fire or a shooting or construction or an accident somewhere, I hit Google and Google News. And I never ever ever find any answers – and I live in Oakland, which is a fairly big city!

  • http://tripp.fenderson.net Tripp Fenderson

    RE: “a built in bias towards newspapers”

    I don’t believe there’s a built in bias.

    The question is — are TV stations formatting their content in a way to be included in Google News?

    My guess is that most are not.

    I know that our TV stations and newspapers publish according to Google’s technical specs and we’re well represented in our markets.

    Google now pings us throughout the day to the point that we’re now on their site and articles are indexed sometimes within minutes of publication.

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