Google News has been tweaking its algorithm to show more updated and fresh stories as well as identifying the local news media which would be covering stories which may become global events writes Sharad Jain on the Google News Blog.
We are constantly improving our algorithms to bring you a better organized, more relevant selection of the day’s news. This is an ongoing process, but in the past few months we have been working on a number of improvements that we hope bring us closer to this goal. While many of these aren’t new features that you might notice right away, we hope they’ll provide a better experience.
The two examples of new tweaks to the Google News algorithm are shared as determining which stories are adding fresh content to a breaking news story and updating the Google News results to reflect this.
So instead of just seeing the most recent publishing activity for a breaking story, we highlight the sources which brought you the information in the first place. Once there’s new information from another source, we update our results so you get any new developments to the story.
The second, which I think is incredible, is giving recognition to the local news media and local sites which are covering a story as it breaks, so hopefully if there is a great baseball game in Los Angeles, we won’t be reading about it via a wire story the New York Post, and more importantly, if a tragic or life changing event occurs, we can read the effects that event has on the people it touches the most.
We have started actively promoting high quality local reporting in addition to coverage from foreign sources. This means we try to find sources at the scene of a story who are doing original reporting.
It may be a national or international story with many sources from around the world reporting on it, but often times one of the best sources of information on a story are those closest to it.
