Update: According to Danny Sullivan, who spoke with Google about the subject, the “In the News” box is now showing content from additional sources, including reddit, the Yoast blog, and other content deemed newsowrthy. This includes things that are not actually in Google News, but also includes the traditional Google News content.
It looks like Google News is now using reddit as a content source, which is interesting for a variety of reasons.
Search Engine Land, working off a tip from a reader, points out that Google is showing a link from reddit in its News results for the query “dunkin donuts”. We were able to reproduce this:
Reddit is the self-described “front page of the internet,” which is actually a pretty accurate description for a lot of people. The Internet’s biggest, most important, and most interesting stories, pretty much always end up on reddit one way or another. That said, so do a bunch of other ridiculous things.
It’s unclear just how much of reddit Google is tapping here. Interestingly enough, this particular result isn’t even from a news-themed subreddit, but is from r/funny. On top of that, it’s not even an article or particularly newsworthy, but an image someone uploaded to Imgur, as a great deal of the content on reddit is.
Google isn’t just showing users the Imgur image, however. It’s showing them the reddit page, which comes with the user’s headline, as well as all of the discussion that ensues.
As we’ve seen in the past, big stories sometimes hit reddit before they hit the mainstream, and this could be why Google has included it, as it’s not the typical type of content Google News is looking for, as evidenced by its guidelines.
Reddit frequently provides a source for interesting content that many publishers latch onto and regurgitate into articles that then in turn may show up in Google News, so it’s quite interesting to see Google just going straight to the source even when not in article form.
Images via Google, Imgur/reddit