In this highly covered American presidential campaign season, people from both sides of the political spectrum tend to wonder how others are receiving much different information about candidates, American political issues, and perceptions of the world at large. This is especially apparent in the discussion of climate change and energy development. Cookies on internet browsers and sites enable users to isolate themselves in articles, people, and advertisements amenable to their prior beliefs and ethics.

Google has a neat map that allows people to combat this polarization of news stories at http://www.newsmap.jp. Here, Google displays the most clicked and searched stories of the day, meaning both Fox News and MSNBC stories appear on the website. Updates occur automatically every ten minutes. The default setting shows the most popular stories from the United States, but this can be altered to show stories specific to various European countries, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Brasil, and Argentina. Users may customize the stories they see by unchecking or checking news categories: World News, National News, Business, Technology, Entertainment, and Health.

Newsmap not only shows the main articles read by Google users of a country, the website shows the amount of related articles to the trending articles. Instead of seeing a bazillion articles on basically the same topic trending on your Facebook feed, Newsmap offers a more balanced and diverse range of notable topics for the moment.

This a great tool for geographers because it enables spatial analysis of news on the national scale, and shows the propensity of different countries towards scientific and environmental news. Geographers then know what the general population thinks or knows about a topic, enabling more effective education to occur surrounding climate change and human-environment interactions.

Enjoy perusing the diverse news from around the world!