Google Search Results Will Now Show Tables From Data Journalism News Articles

When it comes to text, videos or images, millions of people around the world rely on Google Search to get the relevant results. Now Google has identified ways to make the results of even tabular data search more relevant.

The advancement is important in view of the fact that the importance of data journalism is on a rise across news organisations and data tables are often the most useful format for them.

"Based on feedback from 30 of the top data journalists in the world, we identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for all people to find the data they're looking for," Simon Rogers, Data Editor at Google News Lab said in a blog post on Tuesday.

How does it work?

News organisations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant Search features.

They add the structured data to their existing html of a page, which means that news organisations can still control how their tables are presented to readers, Rogers said.