Google today rolled out an overhaul of the way they serve news results along with traditional web results. Planning to do away with the Google News OneBox, which serves links to Google News results above web search results, Google plans to integrate Google News results into their SERP’s.
Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land has a very nice rundown on the Google News plans. Here are the highlights:
- Allows Google to rank news according to relevance in search results rather than at top of the page.
- New technology Google has developed to “dig deeper” into news and find truly relevant stories, rather than simply displaying up to three headlines in the OneBox format.
- News results will appear anywhere in a search result page, and links to different sources will be clustered together.
Is this the end of the OneBox? For Google News it is.
Yahoo has similarly done away with the Yahoo News Shortcuts which appeared above their search results for a large amount of terms (especially branded ones)which are not entirely news related. Formerly, searches for “MapQuest”, “MySpace.com” or “Google” would result in news results served before the site users were trying to find.
Yahoo trimmed back on their News Shortcuts months ago in an attempt to better the user experience, which is an across the board mission at Yahoo Search.
