Going Local

The Official Google Blog recently announced that you can now see "local" news results within Google News for queries for your city name or zip code. The news will be presented from local news sources. The goal that the Google team had been working towards was to not have local news limited, similar to the multiple sources that are displayed for regular Google news sources. The idea is to provide many angles on the same story but with local news you can imagine how that can be limiting. They feel that they have found a good balance with their local news. They claim that,

they can create a local section for any city, state, or country in the world and include thousands of sources still!

They analyze each word of each story for the location of the news AND the location of the source. Pretty ingenious. They are saying that it is still an experiment, but then again Gmail is still in Beta!