Online Journalism News

Mapping website launched to allow geographical news search

Posted: 25/03/08 By: Oliver Luft

Email this story | Comments

US geographic search company MetaCarta has launched a new website mapping news stories from over 1,400 news sources across the globe.

The service, called GeoSearch News (pictured below) lets users specify a place-of-interest and returns mapped search results presented in order of relevance - as determined by a combination of keywords and the specified location.

Journalism.co.uk reported in December that Reuters had started using MetaCarta to experiment with a mapping service to help users visualise breaking news by linking its online stories geographically.

The Reuters' maps appeared beside articles on the site's US news channel, plotting stories on world map according to the places mention.

By rolling over pinpoints on the embedded Microsoft Virtual Earth map, users were given a location and news headline linked to specific articles.

image of metacarta news map

Similar technology has now been put to wider use listing geographically a series of international, regional and topic specific news publishers and bloggers.

"It [GeoSearch News] combines the unique power of geographic search with keyword search and is the single place to find current news stories, from a wide variety of sources, about any place, quickly," said Rick Hutton, Vice President of Content Services at MetaCarta.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.