Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 56 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Coming to you a day early this week in case some of you are signing off early for Memorial Day weekend.
There will be no “Tuesday” edition next week.
Friday Thursday Five
I. Google Announces News Ranking Feature That Apparently Isn’t ‘New’
II. Search for Lists on Twitter Desktop
III. Bard Adds Images (with Citations!)
IV. TikTok Teases an AI Chatbot
V. Personal Info You Share with TikTok Could End Up on its Internal Communications Program
VI. Other Important Updates
I. Google Announces News Ranking Feature That Apparently Isn’t ‘New’
To better surface relevant, expert, and knowledgeable content in Google Search and News, Google developed a system called topic authority that helps determine which expert sources are helpful to someone’s newsy query in certain specialized topic areas, such as health, politics, or finance.
Google’s search account tweeted Tuesday about this.
But then Search Liaison Danny Sullivan said, “It is a ranking system we've had and used for several years. We're just sharing about it now.”
According to Google, “the most prominent signals are:
How notable a source is for a topic or location: Our systems understand publications that seem especially relevant to topics or locations…
Influence and original reporting: Our system looks at how original reporting (for example the publisher that first broke a story) is cited by other publishers to understand how a publication is influential and authoritative on a topic…
Source reputation: Our system also looks at a source’s history of high-quality reporting, or recommendations from expert sources, such as professional societies…”
🛠 Why does this matter? To be fair, this is aligned with what Google has always said was its mission for its SERP: To show original, useful content that matches the user’s search-keyword intent.
The weird thing is that they publicized it as if were something new, when apparently it’s been “used for several years.”
In any case, the documentation is dated May 23 (Tuesday of this week).
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II. Search for Lists on Twitter Desktop
You can now search for public lists on Twitter desktop based on keywords.
Go to Twitter.com
Click the Lists tab
Search for your keyword(s)
Click the list of interest OR hit return to bring up a full list of results
Click the Follow button
🛠 Why does this matter? Twitter lists are a great way to segment users into specific topics. This is especially useful if you want to stay up to date on the latest info from a select group of reliable sources.
Curating these lists, though, can be time-consuming. Now, you can just follow an already-created list, or find ideas for accounts to add to your own.
The ability to follow others’ public lists is not a new feature. Finding them, however, has never been easier.
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