Google is known for it’s innovate thinking which has made them leaders in Internet search and applications. Google Earth has now incorporated Google News displaying related news specific to the area.

To activate this interesting feature, navigate to the “Layers” menu found on the left side of Google Earth. Click on the Gallery to expand it. You would find “Google News” option. Check the box next to Google News Layer. To read the complete news story, click on the News icon.

Google News on Google Earth constantly updates index stories from more than 4,500 news sources worldwide. You can zoom into your areas of interest or your native cities to know more about regional, national, and local news.

It all started as a prank by a 15 year old Tom Van detta. He tried to post an article which stated that he has been recruited by Google to work from home and that they would be paying a low salary.

Van detta, found out from a blog that there is a possibility of fooling Google’s news system by publishing fake news releases. He decided to try this out and submitted a fake release which claimed that this 15-year old New Jersey student has been recruited as one of Google’s youngest employees.

Tom used one of the free news services to post this news release. The news release claimed that Google Spokesman Sonya Johnson informs that the search engine giant Google Inc has recruited a 15 year old student after discovering his blog and his expertise in working with AJAX and Javascript. It also mentioned that he would be paid a low salary. However, the salary would  be placed in a bank for his future education by none other than the CEO, Larry Page.

Merely few hours after this press release, he found out that this news has become the top news in Digg making it an incredible international technology story of the day. Google started displaying the reference in its own Google News.

Google engineers have to work on a filter which would check the creditability of any news that is being displayed in its search engine results to avoid such misleading news stories.