Local news in more places

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager



Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and this week we launched this feature of Google News to users in the UK, India, and Canada.



Local news sections let you keep track of current events in your area. We analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results, and our rankings also take into account a publication's location to promote local sources for each story.



To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city, state, or postal code in the local search bar, shown here:







If you don't see this section, you can also set up your local news by clicking "Personalize this page" on the top right of the page. On the menu that comes up, click "Add a local section":







Once you've clicked the link, you'll see a place to enter a postal code or city. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you'd like to see. To finish, click "Add Section" and you'll see this local section on your personalized Google News page.



As always, we're working to improve our product, and we appreciate your feedback.

New Insights for your Search

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Some of you may already be familiar with Google Insights for Search, which launched last August.

Much like Google Trends, you can use Insights for Search to analyze search volume patterns over time, as well as related queries and rising searches. You can also compare search trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Insights for Search can help you can analyze everything from interest levels in rival soccer teams to the relative popularity of politicians.

Today the Insights for Search team launched additional features that allow you to see what the world is searching for beyond Google Web Search, by adding new data sources including Google News, Image Search, and Product Search. The new Insights for Search lets you break down search data in several ways. For starters, you can take a look at the rising News searches over the past 7, 30, or 90 days.

You can also view the popularity of a given query across different geographies, from country-level down to individual metropolitan areas. For journalists and newspapers, this feature could be a useful tool to gauge interest levels in different subjects among a reader base.

For instance, with March Madness in full swing, I was curious to see if interest in basketball runs equally high throughout the U.S. I tried a search for "NCAA" queries on Google News over the past 7 days, and found that interest was predictably high across much of the U.S. yet markedly higher in Kentucky, Iowa, and Kansas, as you can see on the map below:

Of course, Insights for Search can't quite explain these search asymmetries, but they're interesting to note nonetheless!

To learn more about this new release of Insights for Search, head over to the Inside Adwords blog, or start exploring right away on the Google Insights for Search homepage.

More Hosted News partners in Europe!

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

We're excited to announce today that 8 news agencies, which are members of the European Pressphoto Agency, will be joining our existing Hosted News partners. As with our existing agreements, these new partnerships will enable us to host and distribute EPA's original newswire content on Google News, highlighting the original contributions of even more newswire journalists providing you with access to stories right from the source. We hope to make EPA's content (which will also include ads) available in the coming months.

We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners as well as new ones to come, to help them distribute, promote, and earn revenue from their content.

For more information on Google News, visit: news.google.com.

Ads on Hosted News

Posted by Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager

As we mentioned last month, for some time we've been experimenting with a variety of ads on Google News. Our goal with all these programs is to provide the best experience for users, advertisers and publishers. You've already seen some examples such as ads in search results for news and ads in videos from our YouTube partners. Starting today, you'll also begin to see ads alongside full text articles that we host on Google News. That means that when you click on a Hosted News article, in addition to photographs, maps, and related stories, you'll also see contextually relevant ads underneath the main story text.

We're always looking for ways to work with publishers to help them distribute, promote, and earn revenue from their content, whether they maintain their own destination website or not. We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners as well as new ones to come.