Google is taking new steps to make data journalism easy to view in the search results.
When it comes to news, videos or images, millions of people around the world depends on Google Search to get the relevant results. Now Google has found a way to make the results of even tabular data search more easy and relevant.
Google today posted in its blog post that Google News Initiative is to make data journalism more visible and the field is quickly growing across media. Over half of all newsrooms now have dedicated data journalists, and this feature aims to find the most useful news results from pages containing data tables.
Google News Lab’s Simon Rogers wrote in today’s blog post, “Data journalism takes many forms, and it’s not always clear from the headline that there is potentially useful data within that document or story, it isn’t always easy for Google Search to detect and understand tables of data to surface the most relevant results.”
News organizations that publish data in the form of tables can now add additional information in the form of data sets to make the pages easier to identify for use in relevant Search features.
Rogers said, “Google adds structured data to their existing HTML of a page, which implies that news organizations can still control how their tables are presented to readers.”
Details and guidelines about the new search feature are now available on the official Dataset page for news publishers. They can also check out examples of how the new structured data format can prove useful for users.
