People searching for news, breaking news, or mainstream newspapers or cable television news channels on Google are now being served clickable news headlines rather than a site description. Not sure if this feature is a test or fully rolled out, but I’ve asked several people today who are all seeing it.
Here’s what the new feature looks like:
Compare this to what you find on Bing, which is CNN’s usual description about delivering the “latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics, and more.” Also, notice Bing highlights the “Latest from cnn.com” which are being pulled straight from CNN’s RSS feed.
Similar to Google’s sitelinks, but without any of the obvious visual cues that there is actually a link there (e.g., color blue, underlining) unless you hover over it.
Clicking on the text takes you directly to the story. This feature obviously isn’t as “fresh” as its realtime/ Twitter results, as this is highlighting stories from 12 and 10 hours ago for CNN, and even older stories for the Los Angeles Times.
Wonder whether comments, pageviews, or social sharing determine how Google is pulling in these headlines, as it seems the stories that are highlighted by Google have high numbers of Facebook shares and lots of comments.
So far, I’ve found these headlines are appearing on the big three cable news channels — CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. Fox actually has the freshest headlines, all coming within the past hour.
Newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times are among the websites with the headlines