Google Search Makes It Easier to Find Facts and Data From News Websites

• Google is reshaping how the search engine works by offering structured data in its search results through partnerships with data journalists.
• The new feature is part of the Google News initiative which was announced earlier this year.
• The tech giant will be working towards offering better search results in Google News and YouTube as well in the near future.

Google revealed that it has been working with thirty of the best data journalists to allow users access to data tables in Search results. While the tech giant’s search engine will not display tabulated data on its own, website publishers need to display data tables which can be detected by Google to display results. Before the implementation of tables in search engine results, Google Search would simply show a text description under each URL.

If users make relevant queries which are linked to the data, the tabulated information will automatically be displayed at the top of search engine results. ProPublica is one of the first data journalist companies to take advantage of the new data, and their search results were showcased in the Google blog.

Image Courtesy of Google

Deputy Managing Director at ProPublica revealed “As a news organization that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need. If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.” Google Search already highlights and indexes various kinds of data which show up in their search results, but the recent efforts are focused on data journalism only.

Google also revealed that as part of the Google News Initiative, YouTube and News results would also display facts and data for users in the near future. It will take a while until tables start showing up for websites in your search results as developer documentation for adding structured data for the search engine has just been released and it'll be a while until we see tables in search results on a large scale basis.

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