Google provides a significant percentage of the incoming traffic which many news sites get, but the algorithms that determine which sites get that traffic are proprietary and not widely understood. Academics at Northwestern University decided to attempt to quantify how those algorithms work by looking closely at search results for news related queries for one specific month, November 2017. The researchers identified 200 search terms related to hard news events and then ran those terms once for each minute of each day. What they found after collecting all of this data is that Google’s top story search results are concentrated on a small handful of major outlets.
