Google has added a 'local' option to Google News allowing users to pull up stories that involve their city or neighbourhood.

Users enter a city or postcode in the localisation box under 'Advanced Search'. The information is then used to organise news search results.

The results are displayed in the normal way, with multiple sources of the same story grouped together.

Google engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna said that the aim is to offer a more versatile local feature that uses the entire news service, rather than local sites grouped together by hand.

"While we are not the first news site to aggregate local news, we are doing it a bit differently," the two wrote on the Google news blog.

"We are not simply looking at the byline or the source, but analysing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located."

Google hopes that the approach will allow users to gather news about a specific region from all sources, rather than just local sites or newspapers.