Abstract

[Article link]

Keywords

Digital media, Google Discover, Search engine optimization, Online journalism, Mobile news, Personalized news, Web visibility, Google.

Introduction

Search engine optimization (SEO), understood as the set of practices that helps ensure the content of a given website appears among the leading results of search engines such as Google or Bing (Veglis and Giomelakis, 2020), has become a key business strategy in digital journalism for increasing audiences (Carlson, 2007). This reflects the fact that search engines help users select the most relevant content in response to their queries (Machill et al., 2008) and, it is for this reason, as well as a result of the hypercompetition among the information industries served by the Internet, that the digital media have become so dependent on SEO (Lopezosa et al., 2020).

This growing dependence has been responsible for an increase in studies of the web visibility of the news media and the publication of highly insightful reports on the application of SEO in journalism, most notably Giomelakis and Veglis (2016) and Charlton (2016), who confirm that much has yet to be done in enhancing both SEO and journalistic routines; Dick (2011) and Smyrnaios and Sire (2014), who highlight the need to promote an optimal convergence between the best possible journalism and the best possible SEO; and Lopezosa et al. (2021) and Pedrosa and de-Morais (2021), who describe practical SEO techniques applied in newsrooms.

This growing body of studies concerns itself with the visibility of the news media on digital platforms; however, their web visibility is subject to constant evolution. In fact, today, we find users are also consuming information via other channels, including, for example, Google Discover (Google, 2020a), a smartphone service that offers its search results based on what it considers to be a good match with user interests and profiles rather than on keywords related to a specific query.

This evolving situation highlights a clear research gap that this study seeks, at least in part, to fill. Specifically, our primary goal here is to examine the characteristics of Google Discover from the point of view of how it affects journalism and to present a diagnosis of its impact in, and optimization for, the news media of three countries: namely Brazil, Greece and Spain.

To achieve this primary goal, we set ourselves the following specific objectives:

1. Survey the opinions about Google Discover, as applied to digital journalism, held by SEO experts from Brazil, Spain and Greece working in the digital media and in consultancy firms.

2. Determine the degree of perceived agreement among the professionals from the three countries regarding the role played by different dimensions of Google Discover as applied to the cybermedia.

3. Identify, based on the findings to objective 2 above, the tasks that journalists and the media's in-house web visibility teams are carrying out or should be carrying out in relation to Google Discover and propose a set of best practices.

Theoretical framework

Web visibility and content curation are two fields that have been the object of increasing research interest in recent years and together form, as we shall see below, an essential part of how Google Discover operates. Web visibility studies focus primarily on analyses of specific business sectors in content-intensive sites. Thus, we find research related to search engine positioning in the news media (Giomelakis and Veglis, 2016; Lopezosa et al., 2020; Pedrosa and de-Morais, 2021), universities (Vállez et al., 2022), tourist web portals (Fernández-Cavia et al., 2013; Pedraza-Jiménez, 2018), and libraries (Onaifo and Rasmussen, 2013; Vállez and Ventura, 2020), among others industries (Mladenović et al., 2022).

We also observe a predominance of quantitative studies of SEO audit tools, above all related to the use of such tools as SEMrush (Vállez, 2011), Ahrefs (García-Carretero et al., 2016), Sistrix (Vállez and Ventura, 2020) and Majestic (Orduña-Malea, 2021). In parallel to this, content curation studies focus, among other topics, on curation in the digital media – most notably, Dale (2014), Cui and Liu (2017), Guallar and Codina (2018), and Guallar et al. (2022) – in social platforms – see, among others, López-Meri and Casero-Ripollés (2017), Bruns (2018), Chagas (2018) and Kümpel (2019) – and algorithmic curation – for example, Diakopoulos and Koliska (2017) and Zubiaga (2019).

As is evident, there exist studies about both search engine positioning and content curation, but these two research lines have been developed independently of each other, so that to date there are no academic studies that combine the two worlds, as would be the case of studies of Google Discover and which, as such, would represent a new line of research. It is for this reason that we have seen the need to undertake the current study.

Google Discover (known until 2017 as Google Feed) is a service that allows users to receive news items related to their interests without their having to perform a Google search (Google, 2020a). As such, it is a curation or aggregation system and not a search system. The users can configure the tool based on each news item, indicating whether it is (or not) of interest to them, and so filter the sources they want to consult (Google, 2020b), thus permitting personalized content curation. This means Google Discover offers content that is based on a combination of what Google algorithms consider the user to be most interested in and what is trending at any given time (Infobae, 2019).

The Google Discover interface stands out as operating as a feed, that is, as a news flow. At the same time, it is a system that uses the interactions of its users as one of its inputs (Linares, 2020). Among the most usual content offered by Discover is news on current affairs, especially stories that are trending. It also offers videos, news related to the world of entertainment, sports results, stock prices and information about cultural events, as well as weather information, among others (Ramos, 2019; Fernández, 2020).

This service has enormous potential for users, as it surfaces them with relevant content without their having to conduct a search. Instead, they receive what (it is imagined) satisfies their information needs without conducting a prior search (Coppola, 2021). As such, the use of Discover quickly becomes a habit, with many users using it as a matter of routine to access new content (Vicent, 2021).

In short, it is evident that Google Discover has become a relevant source of traffic for the digital news media (Coppola, 2021). As a result, among those responsible for SEO in the newsrooms, it is generally accepted that a specific SEO for Discover has to be implemented (Soteras, 2021). SEO for Discover draws, in part, on “conventional” SEO concepts and procedures since it is concerned with impacting digital platforms, but it also requires different strategies, since Discover is not based on user searches. Indeed, conventional SEO is primarily based on the idea of a search and a results page ordered according to a certain algorithm.

In contrast, Discover is a system that, as we have seen, anticipates users' information needs and provides them with an information flow in which news or stories about current affairs are one of the main components. While SEO professionals in newsrooms have been concerned with the impact of Discover for some time, what is required are studies that can shed light on the tool and which are of interest to both researchers in the field of digital journalism and professionals involved in media sustainability.

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Citation

Lopezosa, C., Giomelakis, D., Pedrosa, L. and Codina, L. (2023), "Google Discover: uses, applications and challenges in the digital journalism of Spain, Brazil and Greece", Online Information Review, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-10-2022-0574

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