Google announced in its blog that its is working with data journalists from news organisations to better structure and present data in its search engine. Google intends to present a lot of more cohesive data that is related to a search through news companies. The initiative will present related data in an easy to read format in Google’s search engine.
In its blog Google’s Data Editor, Simon Rogers, explains Google’s initiative to ‘make data easier to discover’ by supporting data journalists through Google News Initiative. Google is working with data journalists to create potential data sets that is present within a story published on news web pages. These data sets will in turn help to locate the news and stories on the web related to search words or rather, ‘keywords’, and help bring in more relevant data, or news in the search results.
As explained in the blog, though data tables already exist but Google Search engine is not always optimised in many scenarios to bring forth relevant data in search results. This is where Google intends to work closely with data journalists in news organisations. According to the blog ‘based on feedback from 30 of the top data journalists in the world, we identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for all people to find the data they’re looking for.’
The goal is to add ‘additional structured data’ to the published stories online to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant search features. The famous news organisation Pro Publica, is already experimenting with the structured data sets on its webpage, according to Google blog. News organisations have complete control over which and what structured data sets to add to their html pages when it comes to online stories.
According to Scott Klein, Deputy Managing Editor, Pro Publica, “As a news organisation that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need. If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.”
