Search giant Google has revealed that it is changing the way it displays news stories within the search results on mobile platforms.
People searching Google for news stories may be used to being shown two top news stories as well as a horizontal carousel of results for AMP pages. However, as of Wednesday, some people using mobile devices to search for news are being shown multiple carousels of news content about the same subject.
The company has said that these changes will initially appear on mobile devices using English that are based in the US, with this later being rolled out to other countries and languages.
As well as this, they will also be able to discover additional types of content, including related opinion pieces and notable quotes.
Google made the announcement through a blog post. In the post, the company has included a graphic that shows users the changes it has made and what these look like when searching for news related to NASA. It shows that instead of listing two top stories at the top of the search results, it will now display these top stories in a carousel format, which contains more than two stories. Google has said that this change will allow more high-quality content to be shown beyond the most recent stories, as well as covering a more diverse set of sources.
Furthermore, Google has said that BERT, which was rolled out worldwide this week, is also partly behind this new expansion and the clustering of content. The company also explains in its blog post that it is now using a new “story-understanding technology” to map places, people and things that are involved within a news story and draws connections between them.
These changes are all being made as part of Google’s efforts to surface more and varied sources and news content, which will include original reporting.
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