Hey NK, I think that’s a great suggestion! It’d probably be a bit of a challenge to teach the technology how to recognize that Johnny Cash is associated with Nashville (or anyone is associated with any particular place, etc.). A giant taxonomy, perhaps? Linked GPS coordinates?

My pet peeve about Google News is that it doesn’t geographically weight the stories on its home page. For example, when Johnny Cash died, our paper here in Nashville had blowout coverage, with historical slideshows, timelines, etc. But I believe that Google news featured wire coverage from some other paper elsewhere in the country. Personally, I think they should come up with a way to give the most emphasis to sources that are close to where the event happened, since these sources are likely to have better coverage. Seems like you could probably do this in an automated way by examining datelines and place names that show up in stories.

I sent this suggestion to them a long time ago, but I don’t think they’ve done anything about it.