The first thing many of us do in the morning is check for earth-shattering news, and Google has just made the quest to find relevant news a little easier by introducing a geolocation-enabled “News Near You” feature in its U.S. edition on mobile phones.
While there are plenty of niche local news aggregators like Topix or Fwix available for local news junkies, Google News is the dominant player in the news aggregation landscape with 14.4 million unique visitors in April according to Comscore.
Google has allowed users to view location based news by entering their zip codes on the web since 2008, but today’s leap into mobile local-based news is significant; The battle to capture smartphone eyeballs has only just begun.
Users who want to take advantage of the new feature can visit news.google.com on their smartphone and enable location sharing to see the “News near you” section at the bottom.
You can bring the feature to the top of the Google News page by toggling the arrows in your personalization settings, and pin the web app to your homescreen using the “Add to homescreen” button if you’re on an iPhone or by this (are you kidding me?!) if you’re on an Android.
Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests. Traditionally, news readers first pick a publication and then look for headlines that interest them. We do things a little differently, with the goal of offering our readers more personalized options and a wider variety of perspectives from which to choose. Google News offers links to several articles on...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
