Google

Before They Were Google Top Stories, They Were In The News

First step? Going back to the Google news box beginnings.

In its earliest incarnation, Google results would occasionally feature a “News For” box.

This would appear when a major event or person was searched for, right at the top of the SERP. Generally, it showed a small thumbnail image, headline and short excerpt, as well as related headlines from other sources listed below.

The stories featured in this box were pulled directly from Google News, which only includes sites that have been submitted, reviewed and approved directly by Google.

Then in October 2014, Google tweaked the results slightly and labeled the new box “In the News.”

The information here looked similar to the old News box, with one major difference – it now included news from a variety of sources, not just those approved by Google News.

Rather than going through the Google vetting process, In the News stories were treated like any other search. Google simply attempted to return the most accurate result for the search query, regardless of whether or not it was Google News approved.

That meant that non-news sites like Reddit, Yoast, etc. now had as much of a chance of landing the news box as any other reputable news site.

As you can imagine, that was good news for many smaller sites.

The catch, of course, was that some less-than-reliable content slipped through, in the wake of all the “fake news” scandals, that spelled trouble for Google.

One of its biggest hits came in November 2016, when a false report claiming that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election surfaced in users In the News results.

Enter Google Top Stories

In December 2016, Google announced it was replacing the In the News section on desktops with Google Top Stories – similar to what already existed in mobile searches.

This new format featured a card-style set of stories to better present the most relevant stories of the day.

Some speculate that the change came as a direct result of the fake news scandal, and Google strategically replaced the word “news” to draw a more solid line between its Google News results and traditional algorithm matches.

But Google claimed that the change had been in the works for months, and was simply updated to more closely match its mobile version.