Google Search launches what could be its most useful experiment in years: Preferred Sources
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Google Search surfaces recent news posts from various outlets in Top Stories.
So far, you haven't had much say over the news outlets Google chooses as relevant.
With its new Preferred Sources experiment in Labs, you can select your favorite publishers for their content to stand out.
It's easy to forget, if you didn't live through it, just how much of a game-changer Google Search was when it first debuted in the late 90s. While we had options like Lycos and AltaVista for years, Google just made it so much easier to find the content you were looking for. These days, though, a lot of users feel unsatisfied with the results they get from Search, with lower-quality sites, sponsored content, and AI slop making it so much harder to locate anything actually useful. While you could always continue to just search Reddit instead, this week we're learning about a new experiment that might actually help steer Search results back in the right direction.
Google's got some tips for getting the most out of Search, and in sharing those, it also announces its latest Labs experiment. Once you opt in to testing it, Preferred Sources will give you the option to prioritize results from your favorite, most trusted sources.
Now, before you go thinking you can just permanently tell Google to find the answer on Reddit, Preferred Sources operates on Top Stories results — so we're talking about news posts from publishing organizations, rather than social content or personal blogs. But once you turn Preferred Sources on, you'll be able to hit the star icon in the Top Stories header and choose those sites whose news stories you want to see most.
Knowing Google, you shouldn't expect your Preferred Sources to exclusively populate the top spots in your Top Stories, but you'll at least see them in there when those sites have recent posts relevant to your query, marked with that same star to highlight them. And then it also looks like we're getting a row just beneath that where Google highlights results that really are just from your chosen sources.
Right now, though, we haven't been able to try Preferred Sources for ourselves, despite Google's announcement making it sound like the experiment should be presently available. It's supposed to show up as an option in Search Labs for users in both the US and India, but for the moment we're just getting redirected back to the main Labs page. Hopefully we'll have a chance to give it a try soon and really get a sense for how much influence this truly offers over the results you get.
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