Over the past few weeks, Google has been busy adding resources to its platform to help those affected by the coronavirus (covid-19). After launching its coronavirus website, which provides more than $800 million for medical institutions and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the Internet giant has now added a new way, get government agencies and medical institutions to disseminate COVID-19 related announcements more quickly through Google search.

Google announced today that it will highlight special announcements about these entities in its search results, such as school closures, travel restrictions, cancellations of events, or homebound guides. There are two ways a website can be highlighted in search results: by adding structured data to its web pages, or by submitting covid-19 announcements in the search console.

Google suggested adding to the web page

a result of a COVID-19 announcement can contain a brief summary and can be selected to view more. Moreover, if the site owner is unable to access the HTML, of its site or does not have enough time to implement structured data, an announcement can be submitted in the Search Console (still in the test phase). However, this is only a short-term approach, and there is no way to update announcements that expire within a month of publication, which means that the site owner must update the information manually. sites that like the second approach must be validated in the Search Console first.

The tool is still under development. Although this feature will be available to government agencies and medical institutions first, Google plans to expand this feature to more websites in the future.