What you need to know
- Google Search is gaining Google News's comprehensive Full Coverage feature.
- It's rolling out to people in the U.S. this month.
- Full Coverage allows people to see extended coverage of trending topics, including explainers, interviews, and more.
Google is making the Search app more comprehensive with support from the Google News team. The company is including "Full Coverage" into its main Search app.
It's not a new feature per se, it's just one that allowed you to tap on a news topic and get a lot more contextual information around that topic either on the Google News site or app, and now it's coming to Search directly.
Google's Itamar Snir, Product Manager, Google News explained in a post:
When you're searching for information on a timely topic, you see a carousel of articles at the top of your Search results highlighting relevant news. Now for big, developing news stories, you can tap into a Full Coverage page after scrolling to the end of the top stories carousel or by selecting "More news on..." right below the carousel.
Full Coverage has been a nice tool to keep track of the discourse around timely topics like the ongoing pandemic or the previous election. As we said above, it's been fully available in the News app and site for two years now. By bringing it to Search proper, it's now more immediately apparent to more users. On the other hand, this isn't going to help arguments that Google's Search interface is becoming more cluttered. After all, Google already has a News app. Sometimes you don't want to have to scroll to get to the search results page — especially on a mobile device that doesn't have the screen real estate of a laptop or desktop.
That said, Google is bringing Full Coverage to Search in March on mobile devices to the US., and then later to other countries within the coming months. As Google Search is already freely available on the best Android phones, you won't have to do anything extra to enable it.
