Google says it changed how it ranks stories and updated guidelines for evaluation of search results to help better identify and surface original news reporting
By 2019, Google had spent two years patching its search quality problem piecemeal: letting users report offensive autocomplete suggestions in the name of fighting fake news and promising more authoritative content for obscure queries. But after criticism that Google News couldn't separate commentary from factual reporting on stories like the Trump-Putin summit, the company moved the fix upstream into ranking itself.
This announcement makes original reporting the explicit signal — both in how stories are ranked and in what human raters are told to look for — and puts Google News VP Richard Gingras at the center of defending a term ('original') that even his own follow-up interview concedes is hard to define.
First-order effects
Publishers who break stories gain a durable ranking edge: the first outlet to report a story now has a structural claim to top placement over aggregators and rewrites, immediately changing attribution economics for wire-following sites.
Second-order effects
Rival discovery surfaces face pressure to define 'originality' in their own ranking systems, while publishers gain leverage to demand clearer algorithmic explanations — a demand Nieman Lab's coverage shows was already live before this change.
The trend: Search ranking is shifting from authority-by-proxy toward rewarding provenance, with Google repeatedly redefining 'quality' as whoever did the original work.
Google says a change in their algorithm will better highlight original reporting, not allow the big pubs to outrank the first story. Interesting shift and shows that they found a way to reward freshness and not raw authority in this instance. https://www.nytimes.com/...
After weeks of reporting, a journalist breaks a story. Moments later, aggregators scoop it up and get as much (or more traffic) than the original. Google is changing this by highlighting original reporting. YES! https://www.nytimes.com/...
It's an interesting move to improve discourse online. It's also again illustrative of the immense power these companies have in shaping our reality with very minimal oversight.
Google is going to change its search algorithm to favor original reporting. They are doing it through their hidden listeners - quality raters who work TOGETHER with algorithms https://www.blog.google/... Automation is never neutral and always involve humans & their decisions maki…
My first question? What is original reporting defined!? Google's take: “There is no absolute definition of original reporting, nor is there an absolute standard for establishing how original a given article is. It can mean different things to different newsrooms and publishers”
We announced today that our *algorithmic* systems are working to do a better job surfacing original content *and* that raters have new guidelines to ensure they're better assessing if this is actually showing. That feedback helps us tune the systems https://blog.google/... pic.t…
‘Readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen.’ This is a welcome step from @Google. Will be interesting to see how it pans out https://www.blog.google/...
I do everything listed here at Metacurity, Techmeme pioneered it with just one person at the outset and Google is going to use 10,000 human raters to do this? Interesting to see if Google News is any better in six months. It's really bad now. @google https://www.blog.google/...
Google has released a global search algorithm update a few months ago aimed at promoting original reporting for longer, this is not human aided, this is not core update related - more at https://www.seroundtable.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Imagine if Google had actually highlighted original reporting a decade ago. All the content farms the leveraged search+social (and other people's work) would not have thrived. “Elevating original reporting in Search” @google https://www.blog.google/...
Good move. Humans are biased, but we understand and can mitigate those better than we do machine bias and manipulation right now. #likewar https://twitter.com/...
If you're the first one to discover and publish something, you're now more likely to show up and get credit for your work than in the past: https://www.blog.google/... H/T @MordyOberstein
Here's a good example of Google's years-long failure to prioritize original reporting. This was a scoop with a bunch of original reporting and an on-record slam from Apple CEO Tim Cook. First screen is from the day we published, the second is from today. https://www.techmeme.com/…
A suggestion given to them about 6 years ago and then every year since at Newsgeist. Who knew journalists could be right about such things...? https://twitter.com/...
Original journalism requires time and investment, but it can have a big impact on our communities and conversations. Read more about the steps Google's taking to highlight original reporting in Search → https://blog.google/...
Now do this but don't make Google News exclusively for huge, established news organizations. Google doesn't care about sites in news unless they're NYT scale. 🙄 https://www.blog.google/...
It takes significantly more efforts to create original content Often time, we see content aggregators build their brands by paraphrasing or straight up copying the stories we worked so hard on Thank you Google for valuing original contents 💖 https://www.blog.google/...