This post is discussing a rare event that occurred in the UK. It is not often a national news story is missed by the press because the event took place after the paper went to press and before people wake up, so the only media available are television and the web. However, this happened recently in the UK.

I should put a little background to this case due to the tragic and sensitive circumstances. There is a celebrity in the UK who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. She has publicly endorsed coverage by the media till the end in order to raise awareness of cervical cancer. She has already made a great impression in the UK to raise awareness of this type of cancer amongst young women. The celebrity lost the battle recently. My thoughts go out to all battling this terrible illness. There is a link at the end of this post to make a donation if you wish.

I thought I would follow these breaking events online as my kids watch children's television for a while before breakfast. I didn’t know at the time but the story had not made the Sunday newspapers here in the UK. The story first broke as far as I’m aware at 7am on the main BBC news. Here is what followed and is an example of Query Deserves Freshness (QDF).

What is Query Deserves Freshness?

There is plenty of information out there on QDF, so I will just cover the very basics. There has been a recent Whiteboard Friday on QDF, so take a look at that. Basically, when Google notices peaks in traffic, blog posts and news mentions then it is made aware that something newsworthy is going on.

Google needs to allow breaking news to enter the results without relying on the older, more established content with inbound links as a relevancy indicator. The solution is a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new, breaking information and when they don’t.

The news started to break

I followed the first page results that morning using the same search query and the same Google Datacenter. I tracked all the movement from 7:20am GMT when most sane people are still in bed on a Sunday till 12:30 in the afternoon when the SERPs generally settled. Here is what I found in those first 5 hours.

7:20am - In the Google News section (hereinafter ‘the GNS’), there is no mention of the latest news. At the number 1 spot in the main results is the familiar Wikipedia page. The results are stable and are generally related to news from a few days ago.

8am – There is still no mention of the latest news on the first page. We are now one hour after the news broke on national television.

The search engines start to pick up the latest news

8:20am – In the ‘the GNS’ an older article by the UK National newspaper The Telegraph has been replaced by a photo slideshow from the BBC highlighting the latest events.

8:30am – The BBC news article in the GNS had been replaced with a CBN article and there are 1472 related articles. The news seems to be spreading fast.

9:10am – All of the articles in the GNS are changed to Google News pages. There were now 1914 related articles. Interestingly enough, as the story broke on Wikipedia using a link to a Sky News article as a reference, a link to a similar Sky article appeared in the GNS.

9:40am – An official notice by the UK national The Telegraph had appeared on the first page. This is the first major change in the main first page results.

9:53am – The first page is showing change and the BBC has two articles on the first page. Also, the Guardian newspaper had re-entered after dropping out for a while. There is also an unofficial fan page that is starting to rank well and rank better than the official fan page.

The search results at this point are showing an increase from 500,000 results to 4,200,000. This has occurred over the period of three hours.

11:38am - the GNS remain the same and tend to have stopped jumping around so much, and the main results now include four video links (including two from YouTube). Visually the first page seems to be dominated with video results. The related articles have now increased to 2456 and the results to 4,220,000. The videos from YouTube are starting to attract many comments.

The results have settled

12:30am – the first page in Google has now settled. The main page is dominated by Wikipedia, BBC, Yahoo, YouTube, an unofficial fan site and the official website.

In conclusion

It was interesting to watch a news story break on the internet, especially when the national papers missed the story on their busiest day. I expect the video links that are currently ranking so highly will fall over the next few days and be replaced by respected national newspapers. The videos are currently attracting a large amount of traffic and comments that I expect will be driving the QDF. The relevant articles are increasing by the hour and the search results increased by 3.7 million in a matter of hours.

I hope you find the shared information useful.

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