I get lots of questions about Google News Alerts for specific locations. So here is a collection of all of my tips on limiting Google News Alerts to a single city, US state, or country.
The key to local Google News Alerts
Queries for news alerts can include the location: operator, which lets you name the origin of the news item. You can create an alert with just a location:
location:moscow
Or you can include keywords with the location:
medvedev location:moscow
News alerts for cities
When creating an alert for a specific city, you should test the query first with a Google search. The location: operator doesn’t allow you to include a state or country along with the city name. This means that Google has to make an assumption about which version of that city you mean. For example, location:boston find news stories in Boston, Massachusetts, but location:cambridge finds news from Cambridge, England.
When you want to use a city name with multiple words, you must separate the words with an underscore (_), and don’t assume that common city abbreviations will work. Location:la gives you news for Louisiana, so you must use location:los_angeles if you want news from that city.
News alerts for US states
For Google News on a single state you can use the full name or the standard US postal abbreviation. Once again, you need to use underscores in place of spaces. So New York state news can be found with location:ny or location:new_york.
Country specific News Alerts
For countries you can use the full name or the abbreviation for the standard Internet top level domain country code. One problem with country codes is that Google gives preference to US state abbreviations when there is a conflict. For example, location:de delivers news for the state of Delaware, not the country of Germany. For Germany, you need to spell it out completely as location:germany. When searching for news in the UK, you have the option of using location:uk, or being even more specific with a search for location:england.
Multiple locations aren’t allowed
The Google documentation doesn’t say anything about this, but from my tests multiple uses of location: in a single search doesn’t seem to work. The standard Google syntax would imply that you can search for location:ny OR location:ca, but when this is tested with Google News, it only returns results from the state of NewYork. In each test I’ve done, only the first location: seems to be used.
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- Google Alerts Bug: Multiple locations aren’t allowed for news alerts
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