Google is adding more content to top stories in news search results

Multiple carousels will appear in top results instead of just a list of stories

Google is making changes in how top stories turn up when you search for news on the engine and all this is a part of Google surfacing more sources and deeper news content along with original reporting. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)

Google is adding a new feature to how you see top results when you search for news. So far, when people have been searching for news, they would get to see the two top stories and then a horizontal, scrolling carousel of search results.

According to Google, this change will allow for "more high-quality content beyond the most recent coverage as well as more diverse sources".

Google also went on to explain that it is using a "new story-understanding technology to map the people, places and things involved in a news story, and then draw connections between them" adding that its "BERT language understanding algorithm is partly behind the new expansion and clustering of news content".

These changes are a part of Google surfacing more sources and deeper news content along with original reporting.

Google has said that the changes will first appear on mobile devices in the US and later roll out to other languages and countries.

With more stories now appearing at the top of the search results, publishers will have more opportunities to rank in these top slots. However, there is no clarity about how these slots can be optimised, whether it will or will not affect the 'people also search for' results and whether 'traditional' searches will rank lower than the top news articles now.