I’m bringing back the meh T-shirt from my September post on Google hosting wire stories on the occasion of another Google News development. (Note, however, that Howard Owens says in a comment on TechCrunch that this feature isn’t new. I must be thick, because the Google News Blog post was the first I heard about it, though I hardly needed yet another piece of evidence to suggest I suffer from a certain degree of thickness.)

First, why my meh is qualified: Anything Google does apparently attains an automatic importance simply because Google did it. They are the 800-pound gorilla, after all, and I’m sure this is merely the first tentative step down a path that ultimately will lead to neural news implants, the end of all evil-doing everywhere and the long-awaited (by me) introduction of a 24-slice non-conveyor toaster.

Now here’s the meh part: It’s not a particularly useful product. To the extent that I want location-based news aggregation at all (meet me in the next paragraph for more on that), I want it at a geographic level that’s actually of some unique use or interest. Cities and ZIP codes don’t fit that bill. Anything grouped at or above the ZIP code or mid-size or larger city isn’t any more local than what old-fashioned local newspapers already offer, even in print. And anything more narrowly focused than that - a small town, say - in Google News’ local feature returns an approaching-useless mishmash of not-local-enough content with the occasional nonsensical result mixed in. (This story about the Avonmore, Pennsylvania council appeared in my headlines for the town of Sewall’s Point, Florida, for example.)

“But you’re missing the point,” my imaginary reader (that’s right, imaginary and singular) protests. Surely the value of Google News is its aggregation of numerous sources, giving it a leg up on the individual local newspaper. Not so much, though, because it’s still not showing me news in which I’m in any way guaranteed to be interested. The local news aggregated by Google has all the apparent randomness of the local news section of my ink-on-paper newspaper, with the variety of sources only adding to the effect. The top four (I set it for three but it insists on showing me four) headlines in my home ZIP code all day:

• Maltz Jupiter Theatre earns 21 Carbonell nominations (The Palm Beach Post)
• Jupiter Medical gets stroke center tag (The Palm Beach Post)
• Jupiter police release photo of man who robbed store (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel)
• High school football players don’t wait for colleges to come calling (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel)

I just don’t see the use of this. I want my news preferential and my data location-based. What’s more, don’t try to sell me some big honking city or ZIP code and call it local. I know what and where “local” is. I live here, remember? Much more soon-ish on where local actually lives.