Mountain View, California — Google has long enabled you to look up for local businesses on its mobile search page, and for those people who are interested in keeping tabs on what is happening in their local area, the search engine giant over the weekend announced the addition of a new mobile feature called “News Near You” the latest mobile feature intended to bring users relevant local news.
Dubbed as: ‘News Near You’, it almost does what it says and the address is the same — news.google.com — as well as the sources are those already available via Google News, which keeps smartphone users up-to-date with the latest local news. Introduced in a post on Google’s blog on Friday, the new feature will currently work for users of the English US news edition.
“We do local news a bit differently, examining every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located,” Google said in a blog post.
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To utilize this service, and start browsing local news on your smartphones, Android or iPhone users need to go to news.google.com on their browser, and when the pop-up arises, enter your location details in the search. If the user agrees to that, news relevant to the location will appear in a new section called “News Near You” at the bottom of the homepage.
However, the location-based news service has been available from Google since 2008, this sees it moving to smartphones and getting its own section for the first time. Currently, Google offers a local section for just about any city, state, or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources.
On its blog, Google explained that users can also “turn off the feature at any time” if they do not want to share their location or they do not wish to read local news by simply adjusting the mobile browser settings.
The launch of this new location-based service comes just days after the escalation of the Google and Apple location tracking scandal, with both Google and Apple executives testifying at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Capitol Hill facing questions about about their respective collection of mobile location data from smartphone users.
Google emphasized, however, that the location data it collects is anonymous and deleted after one week. However, after the hearing, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken said he still has serious doubts about the privacy of Google and Apple location apps.
This application, however, is available only in the US English language.