Local news in more places

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.

New Insights for your Search

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.

The Madness of King Google

When Google arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, they came in with a new idea of how to rank pages. Until then, search engines had ranked each page according to what was in the page – it’s content – but it was easy for people to manipulate a page’s content and move it up the rankings. Google’s new idea was to rank pages largely by what was in the links that pointed to them – the clickable link text – which made it a little more difficult for page owners to manipulate the page’s rankings.

Changing the focus from what is in a page to what other websites and pages say about a page (the link text), produced much more relevant search results than the other engines were able to produce at the time.

The idea worked very well, but it could only work well as long as it was never actually used in the real world. As soon as people realised that Google were largely basing their rankings on link text, webmasters and search engine optimizers started to find ways of manipulating the links and link text, and therefore the rankings. From that point on, Google’s results deteriorated, and their fight against link manipulations has continued. We’ve had link exchange schemes for a long time now, and they are all about improving the rankings in Google – and in the other engines that copied Google’s idea.

In the first few months of this year (2006), Google rolled out a new infrastructure for their servers. The infrastructure update was called “Big Daddy”. As the update was completed, people started to notice that Google was dropping their sites’ pages from the index – their pages were being dumped. Many sites that had been fully indexed for a long time were having their pages removed from Google’s index, which caused traffic to deteriorate, and business to be lost. It caused a great deal of frustration, because Google kept quiet about what was happening. Speculation about what was causing it was rife, but nobody outside Google knew exactly why the pages were being dropped.

Then on the 16th May 2006, Matt Cutts, a senior Google software engineer, finally explained something about what was going on. He said that the dropping of pages is caused by the improved crawling and indexing functions in the new Big Daddy infrastructure, and he gave some examples of sites that had had their pages dropped.