Google adds shared by number to Google news results
Google seems to be experimenting with adding a “Shared by [number]” stat next to Google News results - so you can see how popular each story is on Twitter etc. Here's a screenshot - you can see “Shared by 5+” next to the news source:
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the third time Google has probed the space where news meets sharing: back in 2007 it ran Shared Stuff, a bookmarklet-style sharing tool, and in June 2010 it was caught testing a redesigned Google News home page built around sharing options. A Google News blog post from 2007 had already framed the product as a place for perspectives about the news from people connected to it, so surfacing reader activity next to headlines is a direction the team has circled for years.
What is new here is the signal source: rather than Google's own sharing tools, the "Shared by 5+" stat appears to count Twitter activity, and it is an unconfirmed experiment spotted in the wild by blogger Malcolm Coles rather than an announced feature. Search Engine Land picked the story up the same day, framing it explicitly as Google's answer to Bing's social push alongside Facebook — which turns a small UI test into a data point in the search-engine social arms race.
First-order effects
- News publishers listed in Google News get a visible popularity contest added to their listings: readers choosing between sources now see Twitter share counts beside each headline, rewarding outlets whose stories travel on Twitter.
- Twitter gains unpaid distribution on Google's results pages — its activity data becomes a presentation-layer signal on the most-trafficked news entry point, without any announced deal behind it.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and SEO shops have a new optimization target: engineering stories for tweetability to win the Shared-by count, shifting some editorial and promotion effort toward Twitter metrics.
- If Google wants the counts at scale it needs sustained access to Twitter's firehose or API, giving Twitter fresh licensing leverage over the search engines just as Bing courts Facebook for equivalent social data.
Third-order effects
- News ranking drifts from purely editorial signals toward blended editorial-plus-crowd signals, making access to social-graph data a structural input for search competition rather than a cosmetic feature.
- The pattern — Google repeatedly prototyping social layers around News since 2007 — points toward search results where third-party networks supply the engagement data Google displays, entrenching whichever network holds the firehose.
The trend: Search engines are folding real-time social sharing counts into news results, turning access to networks like Twitter into competitive infrastructure for ranking and presenting news.