Today, Google announced that it's going to be elevating original reporting in its search rankings, something that it apparently wasn't already doing. As the company puts it, original reporting "requires significant time, effort and resources by the publisher"; after all, it's on the journalist to gather facts, research those facts, and put together something meaningful with them.
But as tends to be the case with the internet, other sites will write their own stories about the same thing, typically linking to the original as a source. Google says that it would usually put the "latest and most comprehensive" results first in its results, but now it will prioritize the original report, and those reports will be visible for longer.
Google is also introducing new guidelines for its raters, the over 10,000 people that review the search engine. Raters will now be told to use the highest rating for original reporting, assuming that the reporting is investigative and provides information that cannot be found elsewhere. The raters won't actually be able to change results, but they do help Google to do a better job.
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