Google is now adding knowledge panels for trending news stories – search queries that would otherwise not return many results and with results primarily on news stories.

I read a news story about a missing woman, and as the article was a couple of days old, I did a Google search for her name.  Along with organic links, “In the news” links and image results, it showed a knowledge panel for the missing woman.

With only 175k results, it is not only a low search query to display a knowledge panel, but due to the content, it was added only within the last day or two.

It is not clear what will trigger these.  Another big US news story centered around specific people, who likely would not have had a previous knowledge panel, include the story about the two escaped inmates, however neither of their names spawned a similar knowledge panel.

Interestingly, while I was signed into both browsers, the result in Firefox gave me an option to get updates, while I did not see the same in Chrome.

It is great that they are doing this to highlight important people in the news, especially in the case of missing persons.  Definitely worth keeping an eye out to see what other news stories will trigger these knowledge panel as a result of trending stories.