Usually when you search for a company name or brand in Google News, your results are entirely news results for that particular name. But Google News appears to be displaying homepages in the news results as the first result for some queries, rather than news stories about the search query.
When you search for Twitter, instead of news results about Twitter, the first result is Twitter’s homepage, followed by a news result.
The same is apparent for Search Engine Land, with the homepage above news listings from the site itself.
However, doing a search for Starbucks simply shows news results without the homepage result appearing anywhere on the page.
Likewise for a product search, it is simply news results for iPhone.
It is unclear if this change is a bug or intentional. According to Google News guidelines, articles included in Google News should all be news content, not homepages. I have reached out to Google and will update with more information when I receive it.
Jennifer Slegg
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