Top Stories

Google is testing vertical images within the Top Stories section of the Google search results on desktop. We’ve seen vertical or portrait layouts for top stories on mobile, but I…

Google has launched the Preferred Sources top stories feature fully in the US and India, after testing it in Search Labs for a bit over six weeks. As I said…

Google Search is testing yet another way to indicate to Google that you prefer specific sources, news sources, and publications, so that Google can show you fresh content from those…

Google Search has this news or top stories section titled “Backstory.” It comes up from political queries, maybe other news queries.

Google Search changed how many stories it shows for political figures recently. Now Google shows the two by two top stories grid in search for searches on Harris, Trump and…

Google has a section under some of its top stories in search results named “more context.” This will summarize the headlines for your keyword search based on the top stories…

Google is testing a new top stories feature and label that tells you that there are new top stories available since the last time you searched for that query. There…

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections]…

Google can now show video labels or indicators to some news stories in the top stories section of Google Search. The video label is added under the snippet on the…

Google seems to be testing a new feature for top stories named “Open Access.” I am not sure what open access means, if you know, please comment below. It seems…

Google is testing another version of these “mentioned in” features. This one is in the top stories section and it is called “mentioned in these stories.”

Google can now show six top stories in a uniform gird format in the top of the desktop Google Search results. We normally see four top stories but if we…

Over the past few days I’ve seen reports of Google Search testing more visual elements. These visual elements are across featured snippets, top stories, products and likely more.

It looks like Google is testing placing author names in the top stories carousel within the mobile search results. I believe Google had this at some point before, but I…

Google Search seems to be testing adding stock tickets with the stock price of public companies mentioned in the articles Google is showing in the top stories section.

Google has posted a short note in the Search Consoles data anomalies that says there was a bug in Google Search that affected some search features, including but not limited…

Google is testing placing the thumbnail image on the top stories carousel in Google Search at the top and also at the bottom. I believe normally you would see the…

Google not only is testing more list view formats for the top stories section but also testing, for some queries and some searchers, having the first set of web results…

Google Search seems to be testing a new “trending topics” section for some news queries in Google Search on mobile. This Trending Topics section lets you toggle and refine your…

As you may remember, back in April Google said it is bringing signed exchanges support to desktop. Well that launched on Friday, July 8th. Signed exchanges in Google Search for…

Google Search is now grouping some of its Top Stories sections for some queries by topics. This was working on mobile for a while but is now reportedly working for…

The Google Search news box has a header named “News” for some queries. That header was never clickable until just recently. Now, you can click on the header and it…

This is just a reminder, since I covered this back last April but I forgot myself, there is really no top stories eligibility requirements in Google Search anymore. It use…

Last week we broke the news that Google does some form of deduplication of the top stories and web results in some situations. John Shehata released some data from his…

In this show we got everything for you from creepy crawling to blood sucking vampires and and walking zombies. First, we had a few unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates this…

We know Google has deduplication efforts for when a featured snippet is displayed so that it might remove the snippet from the main web results. Google may do the same,…

John Shehata shared a chart from his Newzdash service that showed how Google is showing more web stories in the top positions of the top stories carousel in the mobile…

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed that Google won’t show the AMP specific logo for your news articles in the top stories carousel when the searcher is in the beta version…

This week, I did a bit of a look at what we are seeing around this big December 2021 Google products reviews update. I also spoke about a possible, unconfirmed,…

Now that some publishers, like Search Engine Land, are removing AMP because it is no longer a requirement for top stories inclusion, some are noticing weird changes to the publisher’s…

Google is once again testing new layouts for the top stories section of the Google Search results. This includes not just the box carousel at the top but also double…