You Can Now Tell Google Which Sites You Like to See in Search Results
Search isn’t what it used to be. In the not-so-distant past, your search would return a simple list of links that you could browse at your leisure. Now, search can return many types of results, from AI-powered digests to intrusive or even malicious ads , with links hidden between them. There are ways to make search more useful, but they’re not always obvious.
That’s why I was curious about the latest addition to Google Search. On Tuesday, Google announced that its “Preferred Sources” feature would be rolling out to all English-speaking users in the U.S. and India. If you’re a frequent Google Labs tester, you might remember trying this one: “Preferred Sources,” as the name suggests, lets you tell Google which sites you prefer to read news from. The goal is to see pages from those sites in future Google news searches, as long as those sites publish content relevant to your search.
Here’s how it works: When you search for something in the news, Google displays a “Top Stories” section at the top of the search results page. You can simply browse through the stories Google has picked out, but now you can also click a new button to the right of the “Top Stories” heading. From here, you can search for any website and check the box next to its name to save it to your list of preferred sources. Google doesn’t limit the number of sources you can add, so you can add as many sites to your list as you like. You’ll also see any sources you’ve previously saved (including those from the Labs experiment) here, and you can uncheck them if you like.
Now you can refresh your search results, and with any luck, they will include the new sources you added to this list. Not only will they appear more frequently in the Top Stories section in the future, but Google may also suggest a new section called From Your Sources that will contain only the sites you added to your list.
It’s not necessarily groundbreaking, but I can see the benefit. Any opportunity to personalize your search is probably worth taking advantage of, and with the Preferred Sources feature, you can (and should) increase the likelihood that sites you know and trust will show up next to any news story. It also compares interestingly with other changes to Google Search, such as Web Guide , an AI-powered search engine that automatically groups links into different categories.
It’s hard to find quality information on the internet these days, but I have to say that beyond these two features, Google is making some significant changes.