Google News which has almost lost its audience, specially mobile users, has come up with a new feature called “News Near You”. It is actually what it sounds. News Near You is a location-based service from Google which fetches news related to your current position.
Google had something similar long back in 2008 where the news was filtered according to your location (city, state, country). But with the new News Near You, Google is targeting the mobile users. The idea is very simple – you go to the Google News mobile site and choose to share your location (via GPS or network triangulation). Next, all your news content is filtered based on your location. You can also choose to filter your local news content by topics such as entertainment, technology, sports etc.
What’s more in there? The filtered news for your location not only has newspaper and magazine contents but also blog posts. Though there isn’t any geo-tagging feature active in the blogosphere, but with this kind of development there might be one in near future. Next, Google can also add geo-tagged tweets which carry some sort of news.
In some worst cases, there will not be a single real news near your location. That’s a minus point. Another issue is privacy. People are very concerned about sharing their location. Also, not everyone will want to filter their news by location. The service comes handy only when you land in a very big city and want to know happenings around you.