Google News used to be a great place to keep a news alert. You submitted a word or phrase relevant to a topic in the news, and got an e-mail or RSS item whenever that term appeared in a news story. Great for people who come from a small town, like I do.
I created a news alert for my hometown: Sarpsborg, Norway. Every once in a while there is a story about someone from my hometown who has done something somewhere. As you know, all news is local, so this has been a great service for local journalists who cannot be expected to follow every news outlet in the world.
For some reason, Google News has started indexing English-language AP stories posted by small newspapers -- even papers from Norway. This includes a lot of Norwegian local sites, such as Sarpsborg Arbeiderblad, my main local newspaper's site. Therefore, this article about the Mexican army finding cocaine on a plane from Venezuela may find its way into the Google News system and probably end up in a news alert set to Sarpsborg. That's what happened with this not-very-local story about Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi.
Now, I am not against local papers carrying international stories. But just like my Tidbits colleague Steve Yelvington, who long ago "had the techies block Google from spidering AP Online data on my employer's Web servers," I think they can be sand in the machinery of services like Google News. And
it's up to Google News to root it out.
Google News already yields far too many duplicated hits from wire stories. See for instance this Apr. 14 AP story about Donald Rumsfeld and the military commanders.
Google News has spent the last couple of years adding more languages to get more local. Good job. But to index English-language wire stories on local news sites in Remoteville, Far North, Europe is just annoying. This problem will make people like me turn off our Google News alerts.
...that's the obvious workaround, Melanie, and thanks for bothering. But...
