Google Search is gaining the Full Coverage feature for breaking news results which provides more context about stories from multiple sources.
Full Coverage was first introduced in Google News in 2018. Google promised a wider rollout to regular search results in 2019, but that never materialized.
Now, two years later than expected, Full Coverage is finally available in search results.
If you’re not a regular user of the Google News app you may never have encountered Full Coverage before. Here’s more about what it is and how it may help drive more traffic to publishers.
What is Google’s Full Coverage Feature?
Google’s Full Coverage uses artificial intelligence to connect related stories together in real-time.
As the name implies, Full Coverage is designed to give users a complete look at how a story is being reported on from a variety of sources. It helps users follow the story as it progresses.
This is not a feature that will be available for every news story. Full Coverage is primarily used for stories that develop over a period of time.
For example, the launch of a new iPhone is not likely to trigger Google’s Full Coverage feature because that’s an event that happens once and then it’s done.
An event like the COVID-19 pandemic is much more likely to trigger the Full Coverage feature as it’s a story that evolves over time.
This feature will surface more sources in search results for certain stories, which has the potential to drive more traffic.
There’s no special way to optimize news articles for Google’s Full Coverage other than to publish the news and optimize the web page as you normally would. Google decides when it’s necessary to utilize Full Coverage.
Google’s AI is capable of understanding the people, places, and things involved in a story and how they relate to each other. Full Coverage organizes articles into storylines as the news event unfolds.
There are no human editors involved in curating the stories and the results included in the Full Coverage section are not personalized. Everyone sees the same storyline.
What Does Full Coverage Look Like?
When searching for information on a breaking news story, users will see a View Full Coverage button after scrolling to the end of the top stories carousel.
A View Full Coverage button can also be found by selecting “More news on…” right below the top stories carousel.
Google says the Full Coverage feature in search results is more advanced than the one in Google News, as it’s able to detect long-running stories that span many days:
“With this launch, we’re introducing new technology that is able to detect long-running news stories that span many days, like the Super Bowl, to many weeks or months like the COVID-19 pandemic. We then organize the Full Coverage page to help people easily find top news along with additional content like explainers and local coverage that are helpful to understanding these complex stories.”
Full Coverage is available in Google’s mobile search results starting today in US English. It will be rolled out to more countries and more locations in the coming months.
Source: Google
