Gizmodo – “When we ask who should take the rap for the decline of local news, most folks agree the blame partially lies on Google’s shoulders. The tech giant has spent the past decade systematically swallowing a larger and larger chunk of the digital ad market, diverting the dollars that outlets—particularly smaller outlets—desperately need. That’s not the only diversion that Google’s been doing. In an article published in the Washington Post this week, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the National University of Singapore described how they tried to figure out whether Google might be stymieing people hunting for local news on the company’s search engine. Close to 100,000 searches later, the team reported that, yep, it looked like Google’s engine defaulted to squashing struggling local outlets, and highlighting prominent national publishers in their stead. The team’s findings were published in the December issue of Nature Human Behaviour…”