Google just announced some new features to its news search according to its blog:
“”Last year we updated Google News to make it easier for you to scan for stories that are interesting to you and let you dig deeper when you find them. Today we’re announcing an update that brings some of those same ideas to news search.
Over the next few days we’ll be rolling out the following features:
- Click-to-expand news results clusters: Each news results cluster is collapsed down to one result with the exception of the first cluster. Click on the “Show more” link to see articles from more sources. This improvement makes it much easier to scan through the search results to find just the collection of news coverage you’re looking for.
- Multimedia: Within some of the expanded results clusters you’ll see a bar of videos and photos that relate to each cluster’s content. Click on any of these for more coverage of the story.
- Layout updates: The cluster image now appears on the left and the source information has been moved to below the article links for better readability.
You can try this out by doing a search on Google News or by clicking on the “News” filter on the web search results page. We hope you like these changes and that they improve your experience searching the news.
Google is doing something sketchy with this rollout. I have noticed, Google pulls an image from SOMEWHERE that have nothing to do with the searches at times, and uses them and credits them properly in the fine print underneath the image, while redirecting to a different article. Case in point, check, “domains” in quotes, on news.google.com. The first set of articles about linking .gov to scams displays an image from Help Net Security on the right which leads to an article from ZDNet!
A couple results down from there is a theDomains guest post from a few days ago, about The Future of Exact Match Domains In Search with image from Search Engine Land, that LEADS TO THE SAME ARTICLE!!!
Google didn’t used to do stuff like that . . . If a cluster of articles displayed an image, the image related to the topic of that cluster of articles.
A “domains” search on Help Net Security yielded results from August, so the image didn’t relate to any of the articles in the first group.