Google has initiated a fresh step to help it work with its growing community of news publishers as part of Google search updates.
It said on its official blog, The Keyword, that it was making changes to the backend of its Online search engine to prioritize “original news reports” in search results.
Google News Vice President Richard Gingras said Google had now made changes to its “products” globally to highlight articles that are marked as “significant original reporting”. Such articles, he said, may stay in a highly visible position longer.
This prominence allows users to view the original reporting while also looking at more recent articles alongside it.
As an example, Richard said, in section 5.1 of the guidelines, Google had asked “search raters”, humans, to use the highest rating, “very high quality,” for original news reporting “that provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it. Original, in-depth, and investigative reporting requires a high degree of skill, time, and effort.”
Who are search raters?
As all of us know, Google search largely relies on algorithms to sort through content found on the Web, & organize it in a way that is helpful to searchers. There are also Google search updates at a regular frequency.
The algorithms are composed of hundreds of signals that are constantly updated & improved. But here’s the thing – Google also has employed some 10,000 human raters “to tune and validate our algorithms and help our systems understand the authoritativeness of individual pages”. The feedback by these raters doesn’t change the ranking of the specific results they’re reviewing; instead it is used to evaluate & improve algorithms in a way that applies to all results.
The VP News has written saying in addition to recognizing individual instances of original reporting at the page level, Google has also asked these raters to consider the publisher’s overall reputation for original reporting. That update in section 2.6.1 reads: “Many other kinds of websites have reputations as well. For example, you might find that a newspaper (with an associated website) has won journalistic awards. Prestigious awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize award, or a history of high quality original reporting are strong evidence of positive reputation.”
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