Google's In the News

Google's search results used to include a news section that featured relevant articles from Google News. This section was replaced by "In the News", a feature that goes beyond Google News and also shows popular YouTube videos, forum threads and posts from blogs that aren't indexed by Google News.

For example, a search for [Nexus 6] returns 3 "in the news" results and none of them is from a site currently indexed by Google News. The first result is a Nexus 6 unboxing, the second one is a blog post from XDA Developers that shows how to enable double-tap to wake and the third result is a PocketNow post about re-enabling tethering.

A search for [gifs] returns 3 results from reddit, which is not indexed by Google News:

Back in October, a Google spokesperson said: "We will be pulling from all over the web which means that we will present as diverse a range of voices as possible to ensure we get users to the answer they are looking for."

The downside is that Google sometimes shows non-news videos and threads, but there's a good side to this: Google's news results are more comprehensive and original sources are included.

Find In-Depth Articles

Sometimes you want to find more about a topic and you find a lot of superficial news articles and blog posts that keep rehashing the same information. Google shows a list of in-depth articles for some queries, but this feature seems to be restricted to the US and it's only displayed for some queries.

How to manually trigger Google's in-depth section? Just add &tbs=ida:1&gl=us to a Google search URL and you'll see a list of 10 in-depth articles from sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times‎, Wired, New Yorker, Slate and more. Some examples: [Google], [Daft Punk], [robots], [Russia], [happy].

"In the News" Google Search Card

Google added a new search card for news-related searches. It's display in the right sidebar and it doesn't replace the list of Google News results. For example, when searching for [Jill Duggar], Google shows a thumbnail, a short summary ("Jill Duggar and her new husband, Derick Dillard, are expecting their first child"), a link to a news article and a list of related searches.

The new card seems to be displayed for some people in the news, but only if they don't have their own Knowledge Graph cards with information from sites like Wikipedia. It's probably just an experiment, since it's rarely displayed.

{ via Search Engine Land }