The year 2013 shook the media and political worlds: Snowden’s leaks polarized America; Detroit filed for bankruptcy; and the Supreme Court, the Pope and several states took on same-sex marriage. The year also brought a host of natural disasters and other serious events, as well as some heartwarming stories, such as the Make-a-Wish Foundation fulfilling a young leukemia patient’s dream to be Batman for a day in San Francisco.
Our technology identifies the most important news stories, worldwide. These are gathered and displayed in various places, including the Top stories carousel in Search results, News on Google and the News tab in Search, News on YouTube, and news on the Assistant. The stories that appear in the Top stories carousel are selected from the broad range of topics covered by our global network of news sites. These include editorial-type publications, as well as blogs. The stories that make it to the Top stories are chosen based on relevance, prominence and authoritativeness, as well as the quality of the writing and the website. In addition, a robust and rich user experience on the site is evaluated as a key metric to ranking, and this has increasingly become a major factor in our algorithms. A site can optimize its content for the best possible rankings by ensuring that it is organized and well linked, and by using tools like WordLift to make the site easy to read on mobile devices.