Relevance to your search terms is a key factor in determining what you see for query-based experiences like “Top stories” in Google Search. A piece of content is relevant if it has the information you’re looking for. The most basic signal that information is relevant is when an article contains the same keywords as your search, but our algorithms also have more advanced ways to determine relevance.

Where you’re searching from influences which results you see. We use where you are to help you find content relevant to your area, such as the Local section in Google News. If you’re in the United States and you search for “football,” Google will most likely show you results about the American sport, as opposed to other versions of the sport.

Prominence is a way to identify noteworthy news events. For example, our news algorithms take into account if news sources are heavily covering a particular news story and are featuring that coverage prominently on their sites, if a story has been highly cited by other sources, and if something contains significant original reporting.

Signals help prioritize high-quality information from the most reliable sources available. To do this, our systems are designed to identify signals that can help determine which pages demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic. Those signals can include whether other people value the source for similar queries or whether other prominent websites on the subject link to the content.

Freshness refers to how recently the content was published and how important this is in the context of the subject. When news is happening, our algorithms may determine that a story with up-to-date information is likely more useful than an older one.

Usability assesses how easy it is to view content on a site, such as whether the site appears correctly in different browsers; whether it is designed for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones; and whether the page loading times work well for users with slow Internet connections. Paywalls have no impact on usability in news on Google.

Your interests may help determine results in personalized content experiences such as Discover and the For You tab in Google News. You may see articles that match interests you’ve specified or that we inferred from your past activity on Google products, depending on your activity settings. Our systems do not attempt to rank content based on any political or ideological point of view, nor do they attempt to infer the points of view of our users or of the content we rank.

While some personalized news experiences are designed to connect you with stories you may be interested in, none of our systems endeavor to assess a publisher’s—or a user’s—ideological or political leanings.

We take measures to ensure that Google’s commercial relationships do not impact the design of our news algorithms. Advertisers and partners do not receive special treatment with regard to how we surface news articles.

We avoid using personal information such as gender, religious beliefs, age, health information, race, or other sensitive characteristics as part of our news algorithms.