Google is releasing details on air quality in Search, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Wednesday. The company notes that the launch currently only supports city-level queries. Google first implemented Features in India previous November. The company says it’s now bringing the feature to Search in the US to help people find timely and actionable information about air quality in their area. New feature first discovered by 9to5Google.
Now, when you search for “air pollution near me” and related queries, you will find locally relevant air quality and conditions. Or, you can search for queries like “Brooklyn air quality” or “Boston air quality” to get information for a different location than your current one.
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When you search for a location, you’ll see an “air quality” tag in Google Search. From there, you can see information about local air quality in that area and the people around it, along with details on where Google gets this information. The card will also show you when the air quality information was last updated.
“We’re always researching new ways to connect people with useful information when they come to Google,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We continue to explore ways to provide authoritative information on a wide range of environmental and sustainability topics, and look forward to sharing more in this space soon.”
This new feature combines with a series of updates to Search that Google has rolled out over the past few months. At the end of March, the company added a new “highly quoted” label in Search results to direct users to trusted sources. The new label, which will appear in the Top Stories carousel, is designed to help users identify stories commonly cited by other news organizations.
The day before that announcement, Google launched improvements to its AI model to make Google Search a safer experience and a model that better handles sensitive queries, including those around topics like suicide , sexual assault, substance abuse and domestic violence. It also uses other AI technologies to improve its ability to remove unwanted pornography or pornography from Search results when people aren’t specifically searching.
