A Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread asks why does the same search in Google News USA versus Google News UK show different results? He says:
It’s obviously how this would be a problem for companies with offices in both the US and UK who are attempting to displayed different news items for US and UK publics.
He then asks is this a bug with Google News?
So I did some digging around.
I first compared the results between the search term "cars" on both country specific engines and took screen shots to prove they are the same. You can see the US search and the UK search to see for yourself that they match exactly.
I then wanted to see if this is by design. So I went to Google News Help and spotted this topic that says:
We have more than 30 regional editions of Google News in many different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Each edition is specifically tailored with news for that audience, so just scroll down and select the appropriate one from the list if the edition you are reading isn’t right for you. If we haven't included the region or language you're looking for, check back soon. Our goal is to offer Google News to all of our users throughout the world, so you can expect to see lots of additions over time.
I then thought, yes, the results should be "tailored" specifically for news for that geo-specific audience. So I dug around more.
In a Google Group News Help discussion thread I found Google Groups Guide saying the following:
The front page of each edition shows you stories from sources located in all different countries. The page as a whole does have a focus on issues in Portugal, but it doesn't restrict based on where those stories were written.
So is it just the front page that is tailored with news for that specific region? Sounds like it to me.
So how do you get results for specific keyword searches on Google News to be geo-specific results? I found another thread where Google Groups Guide answered that.
the "location:" search should work as expected now. A search for [ london -location:UK ] shows no results from sources in the United Kingdom, whereas one for [ london location:UK ] only shows stuff from the UK.
So let's try to get those "car" searches to be geo-specific now. Search for car at any Google News english property in this syntax to get car news results found by UK publishers only: car location:uk.
Love learning new things.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
