Google has tweaked its Google News for mobile to add a new feature called "News near you". As the name suggests, it pulls up news relevant to the city the user is in and surrounding areas.

Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008. Since then Google has built out a local section for most cities around the world, seeded with coverage from thousands of sources. As it explains in its blog, it organizes local news differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. It is applying the same process to the mobile version now.

The development will be welcome to advertisers that are increasingly looking to mobile local. In a new survey released by eConsultancy in association with Guava, just under a third of companies (30%) carry out local search, up from 27% last year, while a further 21% are planning to do so. "Local search offers fantastic opportunities for search engines to improve relevancy and for advertisers to better target audiences," according to Guava’s SEO Director Teddie Cowell. "Our own internal stats have also shown particularly rapid growth in mobile and alternative devices since Christmas so I’m not surprised the number of companies involved with mobile has doubled."