Google News offers Related Searches feature

Google News has rolled out an interesting new feature called “Related Searches” which will be popular for people who are looking to expand their knowledge of a news subject beyond just the basic headlines and catchy soundbites.

Related Searches suggests similar searches that you can click on, based on what keywords you are typing into the Google News search engine.

This is especially useful if you want to know more about a story but you don’t know specific details, for example, the names of people or places involved.  By typing in broad search terms, Google News can break it down for you. The recommendations are made by a computer algorithim, which scans the words you type in, and are not searches made by other Google News users.    So it is not a Zeitgeist and an indicator of what other people are searching for.   It is purely an algorithim that looks at what you are typing and throws back suggestions.

Take for example the Zimbabwe election scandal. Now you may have heard the broad overview on the news but can you name any of the politicians involved or any of the politicial parties? No? Then don’t worry. Just go to Google News and type in the search term Zimbabwe.

This then brings back a box at the bottom of the page which looks like this :

This box gives you a bit more of a deeper overview of the subject with names of some of the people and places involved in the story.  You can now click on some of these links to read more news stories connected to your search term or you can always put the terms into the regular Google search engine if you want to do some more in-depth research.

Plus bear in mind that doing Google News searches on these people and places will also bring back more Related Searches!   So it goes on and on and on…..