“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code,” Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in a post to the official company blog. “While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently–we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

Location-based news targeting. Pretty slick. Or it will be, once they get the 90210 bug worked out. Still, as Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta notes, Google’s a little late to this particular game. “This was pretty neat stuff when Topix launched in January 2004,” Skrenta quips. “Now if Google just added 50,000 vetted local blogs to the mix, and a community with 100K posts/day, they’ll have something.”

OK. That explains BuzzTracker’s decision to sell. Now how do we explain Yahoo’s decision to buy? After all, BuzzTracker isn’t exactly leading the market for blog aggregators. In fact, it’s essentially a poor man’s TechMeme and an even poorer man’s Megite. Why buy an also-ran? Apparently, the price was right. “Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space,” sources tell AllThingsD.com’s Kara Swisher. “But those trendier (and more popular) start-ups apparently had too lofty valuations.”