Google announced new tools and features designed specifically to promote local news coverage. The new feature aims to both read and report to help local news organizations.
The most notable feature is the new carousel which lists all the local news from various organizations related to the keywords/queries searched. This feature is now rolling out globally and is available in all languages. This feature comes as an extension to provide more localized information for queries related to COVID-19 and the company is now providing a similar facility for other categories like local government, sports etc.
Google has mentioned that they have worked on fine-tuning the system’s overall algorithm to make it more accurate and also offer more relevant local news sources alongside national publications. top stories and other general news features.
“This improvement ensures people will see official local stories when they’re searching for news, helping both brands and news publishers’ content reach more people,” Google said.
The company has also managed to reduce the sub-topics related to local news in order to provide readers with more relevant local news.
“For example, if you’re in Detroit And search for soccer, we’ll now show you results for local high school and college teams, instead of just showing results for the professional team,” Google said.
In addition, Google has also announced a new data tool for journalists. first thing is new census mapper Project to show census data at the national, state and country levels to allow journalists to embed them in stories.
Census Mapper was introduced as a part of Census Co-op, supported by Google News Initiative, It can show census data at a more local level than just the state, national or country level.
In addition, the company has also improved general knowledge project, to give local journalists more local data.
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