Google News Showing Web Site Results For Some Navigational Queries

Google News is now showing the top web search result listing in the news results when the query has navigational intent.

For example, if you search Google News for [ask.fm] at the top of the search results page, you will see a search snippet and link to their web site. Clicking on the link takes you to the ask.fm web site and not to a news story. Clicking on the “all results” link below that listing, takes you to more web results. Below that, you will find the news results.

Here is a screen shot:

This works for me sporadically for searches on large and even small brands. It works for searching in Google News for [apple], [microsoft], [microsoft.com], and others. But doesn’t seem to work when I search for some other large brands, such as [mcdonalds]. It does even work for smaller brands, such as searching for [rustybrick] but does not work when searching for [search engine land] or even [searchengineland.com].

Google is constantly testing new search features, but this new feature seems to be rolling out as we speak.