Google aims to make it easier to stay informed by using technology to organize and help people access information about current issues and events. News experiences across Google are built to help you easily find news from a diversity of trusted sources so you can stay up-to-date and informed on the stories that matter most to you.
- Connecting to news
- Organizing news
- News platforms
- Presenting news
- News ecosystem
Connecting you to news sources from around the world
Technology enables us to organize millions of news stories in dozens of languages and make them discoverable to anyone, any minute of the day. Google’s automated systems, called algorithms, analyze hundreds of different factors to identify and organize the stories being covered around the world.
In some cases, we may highlight designated topical experiences, but our primary approach is to use technology to reflect the news landscape, and leave editorial decisions to publishers.
Part of understanding the news is learning from multiple sources and being aware of a story’s broader context. Google’s news experiences connect you with sources from your local community, country, and across the globe, working in a variety of languages and formats.
Our goal is to connect you with a broad array of perspectives and reporting to help you develop your own informed opinions. When helpful to understand a developing story, we may highlight and curate topical experiences to provide context and related perspectives around a single news event or topic.
Organizing news from around the web
Google uses technology to sort massive amounts of content to connect you with news predicted to be important, relevant, and useful.
We intend to surface sources that create content about current issues, events, and important topics, and we take steps to ensure that sources adhere to our news policies, which include requirements for transparency.
Elevating trustworthy sources
Google strives to make it easy for you to find trustworthy information and to know where that information is coming from. Our algorithms are designed to elevate news from expert and authoritative sources, and we require publishers to be transparent about behaviors like site ownership, article authorship, bylines, and more in order to be represented in news results.
Fighting deceptive practices
Our news policies target bad behavior, regardless of political perspective. We do not allow sources that misrepresent themselves with regard to their ownership or primary purpose. This includes sources that misrepresent their country of origin or that work together in ways that mislead users about their editorial relationships or independence.
How we rank news content
Our news algorithms use a range of factors to influence ranking. Some of these are:
Relevance
Relevance to your search terms is a key factor in determining what you see for query-based experiences like “Top stories” in Google Search. A piece of content is relevant if it has the information you’re looking for. The most basic signal that information is relevant is when an article contains the same keywords as your search, but our algorithms also have more advanced ways to determine relevance.
Location
Where you’re searching from influences which results you see. We use where you are to help you find content relevant to your area, such as the Local section in Google News. If you’re in the United States and you search for “football,” Google will most likely show you results about the American sport, as opposed to other versions of the sport.
Prominence
Prominence is a way to identify noteworthy news events. For example, our news algorithms take into account if news sources are heavily covering a particular news story and are featuring that coverage prominently on their sites, if a story has been highly cited by other sources, and if something contains significant original reporting.
Authoritativeness
Signals help prioritize high-quality information from the most reliable sources available. To do this, our systems are designed to identify signals that can help determine which pages demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic. Those signals can include whether other people value the source for similar queries or whether other prominent websites on the subject link to the content.
Freshness
Freshness refers to how recently the content was published and how important this is in the context of the subject. When news is happening, our algorithms may determine that a story with up-to-date information is likely more useful than an older one.
Usability
Usability assesses how easy it is to view content on a site, such as whether the site appears correctly in different browsers; whether it is designed for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones; and whether the page loading times work well for users with slow Internet connections. Paywalls have no impact on usability in news on Google.
Interests
Your interests may help determine results in personalized content experiences such as Discover and the For You tab in Google News. You may see articles that match interests you’ve specified or that we inferred from your past activity on Google products, depending on your activity settings. Our systems do not attempt to rank content based on any political or ideological point of view, nor do they attempt to infer the points of view of our users or of the content we rank.
How we don't rank news content
Our news algorithms are not designed to use the following factors to influence ranking:
Ideological or political leanings
While some personalized news experiences are designed to connect you with stories you may be interested in, none of our systems endeavor to assess a publisher’s—or a user’s—ideological or political leanings.
Ad sales or commercial relationships
We take measures to ensure that Google’s commercial relationships do not impact the design of our news algorithms. Advertisers and partners do not receive special treatment with regard to how we surface news articles.
Personal information
We avoid using personal information such as gender, religious beliefs, age, health information, race, or other sensitive characteristics as part of our news algorithms.
Expanding access to news
We aim to help everyone access and understand the news through our products and experiences, including Google News, “Top stories” and other features in Search, Discover, YouTube, and Assistant.
Google News
Google News aims to help everyone understand the world around them through access to high-quality news. Through both mobile apps and a browser experience, Google News connects you with stories that matter to you. Stay informed about the top news of the moment with the “Headlines” section, and see more of your preferred topics and news sources in the “For you” tab. “Full coverage” offers broader context and additional perspectives for a more in-depth look at a given story.
In providing additional context on a story, we sometimes include links to videos, subscribed sources, fact check articles, and other types of content.
Availability: Android, iOS, news.google.com.
News in Google Search
News in Google Search helps you learn about what’s happening in the world through an organized experience of top stories, articles, videos, and more. The Top stories feature aims to display relevant, high-quality results for a news topic. For broader context, the News tab displays more news articles for a given search. Top stories and the News tab are not personalized; everyone within a particular country sees the same results.
Availability: Google app on Android, iOS; google.com on web.
Google Discover
Discover searches the web so you don’t have to, delivering the articles, videos and information you care about most. You can customize what you see by following topics, and choose which ones you want more or less of. Plus, you can get more context through related stories, searches and more.
Availability: Google app on Android, iOS; google.com on mobile browser; Pixel, Nexus or Google Play device home screen (swipe right).
News on YouTube
YouTube makes it easier to find quality news across the platform by highlighting authoritative sources through a number of product features being launched in countries around the world. For example, when you search for news-related topics, you may find videos from news sources in a “Top news” section of search results. Or when a major news event happens, you might see a “Breaking news” section featuring coverage from sources directly on the homepage. In some cases, YouTube provides additional context about certain events, topics, and publishers from third-party sources (e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica) alongside search results and videos.
Availability: Android, iOS, YouTube.com. Availability of news features varies by country.
News on Google Assistant
Ask Google Assistant about what’s happening in the world to access a collection of local, national, and global news in the right format – video, text, or audio. Just ask, “Hey Google, what’s the news?” for the latest top news articles on your phone; or say, “Hey Google, play the news” for top news in audio or video formats. In the Google Assistant app, you can update your profile to include favorite sources. In addition, you can ask for news from a publisher by asking, “Hey Google, play ________ (news organization).” Or easily dive into your specific interests by simply asking, “Hey Google, tell me the latest (sports) news.”
Availability: Android, iOS, Smart home devices. Availability of news features varies by country.
Presenting news results in helpful ways
Whether you’re checking in to see the top news of the day or looking to dive deeper on an issue, we aim to connect you with the information you’re seeking, in the places and formats that are right for you.
If you want to keep up with the news, you need to know what the important stories are at any point in time. With sections such as Top Stories in Search, the News tab, Headlines & search within Google News, news on the Assistant, and Breaking News on YouTube, our systems identify the major stories of the moment. These results are not personalized to individuals, but do vary depending on region, language and location settings.
Google’s technology analyzes news across the web to determine the top stories that will show up for everyone with the same language settings in a given country, based primarily on what publishers are writing about. Once these stories are identified, algorithms then select which specific content to surface and link to for each story, based on factors such as the prominence and freshness of the piece of content, and authoritativeness of the source.
A central goal of Google’s news experiences is to provide access to context and diverse perspectives for stories in the news. By featuring unpersonalized news from a broad range of sources, Google empowers people to deepen their understanding of current events and offers an alternative to exclusively personalized news feeds and individual sources that might only represent a single perspective.
In some news experiences, such as “Full Coverage” in Google News, we show related results from a variety of sources around a specific topic or story. These results are not personalized. In providing additional context on a story, we sometimes include links to videos, subscribed sources, fact check articles, and other types of content. Algorithms determine which content to show, and in which order, based on a variety of signals such as authoritativeness, relevance, and freshness.
Several places where you’ll find news across Google show results that are personalized for you. These include Discover, the For You tab in Google News, and the News tab of the YouTube app on TVs. Our aim is to help you stay informed about the subjects that matter to you, including your interests and local community.
Google relies on two main ways to determine what news may be interesting to you. In the experiences mentioned above, you can specify the topics, locations, and sources you’re interested in, and you’ll be shown news results that relate to these selections. Additionally, depending on your activity settings, our algorithms may suggest content based on your past activity on Google products.
You can control what account activity is used to customize your news experiences, including adjusting what data is saved to your Google account, at myaccount.google.com.
Helping sustain a healthy news ecosystem
An independent and thriving ecosystem of news sources representing diverse perspectives is essential to our mission, and to a well-informed society. We want to ensure not only that users can readily discover a diverse range of authoritative reporting, but that news partners benefit from creating it.
Through programs like the Google News Initiative and Google News Showcase, or products like Journalist Studio and Revenue Reader, we aim to help journalism flourish by helping reporters do their work securely and efficiently, and bring new audiences to publishers.
Tools and resources for journalists and news publishers:
Discover more
THE KEYWORD
Get the latest news product updates
GOOGLE NEWS INITIATIVE
Collaborating with the news industry to build a stronger future
JOURNALIST STUDIO
Tools to help reporters strengthen their journalism
GOOGLE SEARCH CENTRAL
