Google moves to simplify news results

Google has announced that from today it is to keep clusters of news stories together for longer than the previous three days, in order to keep results uncluttered.

The search giant has removed the limitation to prevent the news pages from filling up with individual articles and to help users find older content more easily, software engineer Lucian Cionca explained through the portal's news blog.

"In addition to greater perspective on news stories, this feature will also help us display more diverse search results on the first page: less space will be taken up by individual, unclustered articles," he added.

Earlier this year, Patrick Altoft, managing director of Branded3 Search, commented in an article for E-consultancy that publishing interesting industry news on a corporate website can aid search engine optimisation.

He suggested that businesses providing such content then submit their content to Google News.

Mr Altoft stated that this can lead to an increase in links and citations, helping with natural rankings as well as making firms appear more credible.