Mind Blowing Latest Update From Google

In today’s world, the first and foremost place to find answers to all our questions is Google. Let it be a temperature to the stock price of a Multinational Corporation, we shoot our search queries in that small search box and get relevant information within seconds. When it comes to search engines, most of us prefer Google over other search engines because of the quality of the information it serves to people every time

This tech giant, Google has announced various features and tools for both readers and journalists to support local news on November 16, 2021. Continue reading this article to have a complete understanding of the new features rolled out by your favorite search engine, Google.

Boosting Local News:

Apart from the International News, local news has been increasingly important nowadays to keep ourselves updated and informed about the happenings in and around our locality. Few real-time examples when local news was more important than the National and International news was during the times of flood, state government elections, and pandemic. We kept ourselves updated with the amount of rainfall received, identified the needy, and helped them with the available resources, events canceled everything only with the help of local news because other districts of a state may not have the same amount of rainfall as one place has. Also, we knew the vaccination drives, COVID cases, recovery cases, and various other COVID-related information with the help of local news only.

With local news gaining popularity daily, Google has rolled out the new carousel that lists all the local news from different organizations relevant to the search query/keyword searched by the user. As we already have a local news section for COVID-19 related queries, this update can be seen as an extension of the same in various fields like sports, business, education, etc. 

This feature will be rolled out in all the countries and all languages. The local news sources will appear next to the top stories, which majorly focus on National publications. This feature helps both the readers to get access to the most relevant information and the publishers/journalists to provide more valuable content to their local community. 

To provide deeper information about the news the local community seeks, Google has revamped the entire algorithm to provide authoritative and more relevant articles for narrower topics. With this new feature, people can now get access to information such as high-school level, university level, and college-level sports and other news easily rather than focusing only on the professional teams. 

More Authoritative Information from Social Media:

People develop more trust when the same information is said by their favorite influencer or author on Social media than publishing it as an article on some page of a magazine or a newspaper. To satisfy the same, Google has started surfacing tweets from local authors, authoritative sources, and various local news organizations too. This will enable the users to have additional information about the local current affairs 

Tool for Reporters and Journalists:

To show the census data at the local level and have a track on how people have migrated in recent years, Google has made available The Census Mapper Project where the journalists can embed the map on their stories. This map shows the population growth in a particular area along with the information on the type of population grown in that city/state. 

The other novel tool for journalists is the Common Knowledge Project, a data explorer providing geographic comparisons, charts, and visual data regarding the local population. 

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