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Apr. 19, 2007 at 3:00pm Eastern by Chris Sherman
Google To Integrate News With Web Search Results
Soon, Google will quietly begin changing the way it blends news results and standard web search results, co-mingling links to news sources and web pages if your search terms are relevant to current news events. The new format will replace OneBox news links that have normally appeared at the top of a search result page, such as shown below:
[NOTE: Originally Google was to roll this change out on Thursday, when we posted. Now the company says it won't happen for at least another week. We've updated timing references to reflect this.]
Shortly, news results will no longer be inserted into web pages using a OneBox format. Instead, they will be blended into the regular search results (we can't yet show you how this looks, because the changes are still going live -- more on this below).
"This allows us to rank news according to relevance in search results rather than at top of the page," said Marissa Mayer, Google vice president, search products & user experience.
Mayer said that the changes are a result of 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, which were displayed based on keyword triggers rather than a deeper analysis of news content.
News results will appear anywhere in a search result page, and links to different sources will be clustered together, similar to how stories are grouped in Google News. Thumbnail images related to the news will also appear next to these results.
Keep in mind that the implementation will be different from the Plus Box options Google has been offering for video, maps and finance information. In those cases, you only get information blended from Google's vertical search properties if you specifically choose to get it by clicking on + symbol. With the news change, news information will show without causing searchers to make it appear.
Is this the end of the OneBox, which has been used to show other types of information from vertical search listings such as from Google Scholar or Google Product Search?
Right now, it's only the end of OneBox for news, Google says. But it seems likely that if this works for news search, Google will likely do it for other vertical search results.
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By Chris Sherman
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See Related Stories In: Google: News, Google: OneBox, Plus Box & Direct Answers, Google: User Interface
Reader Comments
Sorry, i think, i didn't get it.
"News will be the part of the search results; no more separate at the top." Right?
Now tell me, what will happen to those blogs in my niche,real estate blogs, which only republish the news from the news papers? Who will get the preference in the search results, original news paper or republishing blog?
It will be a good news for my blog, Ravi Karandeekar's Pune Real Estate Blog, because i am focusing on giving original news and/or my editorial comments!
Am i getting it right?
Sounds like a bad move on Google's part - we don't need anymore news entries in the normal web results. Take the "doubleclick" search as an example, there are already 3 results in the top 10 that are news articles (2 from slashdot and 1 from CNET new). Do we really need more?
Hi Chris,
hakia has been mixing news results with Web search results since last fall. Check out our blog entry: http://blog.hakia.com/?p=87
Please play with the search engine, www.hakia.com, and let us know what you think!
Cheers,
Melek
COO of hakia
![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://searchengineland.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 20, 2007 9:58 PM@ ravi ... you getting right, but Google must have the solution for this problem.
This will be a disaster for the user experience. People have been educated to expect relatively few news results in Google's Web search and to look instead through News Search for recent articles.
Now all that changes and we can expect news stories to be given artificial prominence simply because they are news stories, thus diluting what are already mediocre search results.