Power Searching Google News With Cluster Filtering

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 […]

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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.

Google News Cluster Filters

(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:

Google News Cluster Filters

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:

Google News Cluster Filters

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:

Google News Cluster Filters


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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