Searching Google for news stories is like spinning a roulette wheel nowadays: there’s no telling what you’re going to land on. Are you going to get a thoughtfully-crafted article from a local outlet, or are you going to get some flotsam from a scrape-and-spit infosewage generator or some spun-up propaganda from an information warfare site?

I find this especially frustrating when I’m trying to search for local news around the United States. Unless the news is nearby I don’t know what media outlets to search for, and unfortunately Google News killed off its location: syntax ages ago. (Don’t remember it? You’re not the only one.)

Over the last year or so I’ve been attempting to build a local news search using the FCC license database. In America the FCC is responsible for licensing local television stations, so if I could figure out a way to search those licenses, I could turn the Web spaces of the licensed television stations into a meaningful search space.

Last week, while working on something else, I found a dataset that translated zip codes to DMA (Designated Market Areas), which the FCC uses in its dataset. That was the missing piece I needed to create an easy-to-use local news search: enter a city and state and get a Google search for the TV stations in that DMA! The United States Local News Search is a Web app that’s freely available at https://searchtweaks.com/lns/ . Eventually I will integrate it into SearchTweaks proper but that’s going to take a few days and I want to use it now. 😂 Let me show you how it works, it’s very simple.

To use the United States Local News Search, just enter a city and state and click Search. The program will do a couple of lookups and a make a few API calls and present you with DMA information about that city, as well as a list of television stations that serve the area. In addition, there’s a form for you to do a query of that DMA Web space.

Enter a query and click “Search Google,” and a Google search of that Web space will open in a new tab. Easy peasy!

That’s all there is to it! Give it a spin and see what you think. I initially had some ideas about using Wikidata to expand the amount of news outlets search, but when I did some testing the results were not as great as I’d hoped. I’m looking for other sources of data that I can hook in via zip codes or DMA or city name, so stay tuned — I really do want to expand this.