Ionut Alex Chitu noticed a new feature in Google News that allows you to filter news clusters by three options. The three options include, “All Sources,” “Blogs,” and local news options. Let me walk you through this step by step.

You can access Google News clusters a few ways, but here are the two most common methods:

(1) Google News‘ home page groups stories into clusters. You can view the details of that cluster by clicking on “all ### news articles »” at the end of the news block.

(2) Google News’ search results do a similar thing for the news search results.

I picked the Brett Favre story. Clicking on the view “all 3,019 news articles »” took me to the “all sources” filter. Here is a screen shot:

I can then filter the sources down to “blogs” only, which actually appends a &rfilter=2 to the end of the cluster URL. Here is a screen capture of just the blog filter on:

Finally, you can set the filter to show you only the local news sources. In this case, there are results from Green Bay, WI. Google appends a rfilter=”3&hubgeo=[city,state,country] details to the URL. Here is a screen capture:

Related Topics: Google: News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz