Google Search now displays city-level air quality information in the US

Google is rolling out detailed information about 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 rolled out the feature in India last November. The company says it’s now bringing the feature to Search in the United States to help people find timely and actionable information about air quality in their area. The new feature was first spotted by 9to5Google. 

Now, when you search “air pollution near me” and related queries, you’ll find locally relevant air quality and conditions. Or, you can search for queries like “air quality in Brooklyn” or “air quality in Boston” to get information for a location that is different than your current one.

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Once you search for a location, you’ll see an “air quality” card in Google Search. From there, you can see information about local air quality in that area and those around it, along with details about where Google is getting this information. The card will also show you when the air quality information was last updated.

“We’re always working on new ways to connect people with helpful information when they come to Google,” a spokesperson from the company said in a statement. “We continue to explore ways to make authoritative information on a range of sustainability and environmental topics readily accessible and look forward to sharing more in this space soon.”

The new feature joins a series of updates to Search that Google has launched over the past few months. In late March, the company added a new “highly cited” 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 that have been frequently cited by other news organizations.

A day before that announcement, Google rolled out improvements to its AI model to make Google Search a safer experience and one that’s better at handling sensitive queries, including those around topics like suicide, sexual assault, substance abuse and domestic violence. It’s also using other AI technologies to improve its ability to remove unwanted explicit or suggestive content from Search results when people aren’t specifically seeking it.