Google will be prioritizing original reports in its search results

According to Google, the platform is taking some new steps to make sure that the original reports get prioritized in search results as compared to others. With this new update, Google will be making the articles with major news cycle get a more prominent place in the search results rather than a short time period until a piece of new story comes and buries it up.

Usually, the search results show the latest and comprehensive content of stories but not anymore. Google recently made a few changes to its products globally in order to help highlight the articles identified as original reporting. According to Richard Gingras, VP of News, articles with original reporting may stay in a visible position a lot longer than usual. The prominence of articles for a longer period helps users to view the original reporting along with more recent articles of news as well.

If you take a look at the original reporting, it can be tricky. On one side, original reporting provides all detailed insight and on the other, stories do no reporting at all. Between original reporting and other stories, there are stories with real reporting that go unnoticed. Publications and individual articles sometimes also combine original reporting with news released somewhere else to make the reporting more prominent among others.

Can algorithms know about the differences between original and other reporting?

Google uses Quality Raters to understand these distinctions, a network of more than 10,000 individuals offer feedback on Google’s search results and the tech giant in turn, uses that feedback to improve the search engine algorithm for better results.

Google specifically changed its guidelines to help articles provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed if the article didn’t reveal it. The articles with original reporting will be highly rated and the guidelines also ask raters to note the publication’s general reputation or its history of high-quality original reporting too in order to select an article from a publication.


According to Gingras, Google is constantly trying to evolve to understand the life cycle of the story and to help make the original stories stay a lot longer than usual. This new effort at Google to search for new ways to work with the news industry is a $300 million News Initiative that was announced last year.

Bottom Line

Google is one of the largest tech companies with millions of users from all over the world and the services and product it offers are to help ease its users in all the ways possible. This new effort by Google is an attempt to help make the news industry full of original reporting as compared to earlier days when you could only see comprehensive reports on news and not the original articles. So this new policy launched by search giant will be helping publishers with original reporting be more prominent and to stay a lot longer than usual. We are really looking forward to the original reporting policy to be launched globally.


Photo: Tobias Schwarz / AFP /Getty Images

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