You may have heard about Google’s new feature in the US and India: setting preferred sources in News search. You can set unlimited preferred sources and they’ll appear at the top of Top Stories and your News search results.
I’m glad Google is doing this; considering all the AI-generated crap and information warfare sources worming their way into Google’s search spaces, being able to set the sources you like best makes finding useful stuff easier. On the other hand, you are limited to the number of outlets you know about. As far as I can tell you can only specify sources by name or website, not location or type.
I have been wary of Google News’ search results for a long time, ever since Google became a lot more opaque about the source list and how the sources themselves were vetted. In the last few years I’ve been working on tools to let you create lists of sites to search in Google. Unlike Google’s “Preferred Sources” setting, my tools use external sources to show you news and media sites you may know nothing about. You can even find them by US location.
In this article I’ll show you 4 tools I’ve made that let you search specific news/media sites on Google. All these tools are free to use and free of ads. I hope they’re useful to you! Let’s get started.
Non-Sketchy News Search
https://searchtweaks.com/non-sketchy-news.html
Non-Sketchy News Search is part of SearchTweaks.com, a collection of 16 tools to make Web search better. NSNS uses Wikidata to find news sources by keyword. They’re presented to you in a table. Select up to 15 of them and bundle them into a Google search.
US Local News Search
https://searchtweaks.com/local-news-search.html
Another SearchTweaks tool, US Local News Search has you specify a city and state. With that information it discovers the TV stations serving that city as well as a list of newspapers and NPR stations serving that state. Turn up to 25 of these sources into a Google search.
Local Search America
https://localsearchamerica.com/
Local Search America is a collection of three tools which let you find media, government, and education information by city and state. Two tools are relevant for finding sources to search: the eponymous Local Search America and Local News TV.
Local Search America
Local Search America finds TV stations, government agencies, and institutions of higher education by city and state. Bundle up to 25 sources into a Google search. You can also add search terms and set your own search timeframe (from the last 24 hours to the last year.)
(If you’re interested in searching just the .edu web space, you’ll find all kinds of slicing and dicing with the SearchTweaks tool Super Edu Search.)
Local News TV
Sometimes something is happening RIGHT NOW and all you want to do is get to a local news outlet to get the latest. Local News TV indexes 660 FCC-licensed TV stations which have presences on YouTube, and shows the latest news for each one via YouTube’s RSS feeds. You find them by specifying DMA (basically US metro area.) Filter buttons allow you to toggle certain types of news on and off, or you can search by keywords.
I feel that as the web gets more and more choked with slop and disinformation, it will be critical to effectively create search spaces by generating your own source lists. Google’s preferred sources are a good first step, but if you’re looking for search outside your own knowledge index or geographical area, I think you’ll find the SearchTweaks and Local Search America tools useful as well.
