As if there aren’t enough distractions to play with already – Google has now combined its news channel with Google Earth, a blog post from the search engine’s product manager says.

As Google News updates with new stories from its index of sources, the new layer on Google Earth will map these according to their location.

Updates on the map will be flagged with a Google News icon, which will display a headline and snippet of the story when clicked, plus links to other info on the event.