Facebook is increasingly being used for news, which, as it's a challenge to the news-crazy and recently public Twitter, the world's largest social network would like to see continue. On Monday, Facebook announced its new goal is to make the News Feed more newsy than ever by updating the web app's ranking system.

"The goal of News Feed is to show the right content to the right people at the right time," began Facebook's post announcing the change. The world's largest social media website has increasingly been a place to find news, with the term "News Feed," for many no longer being a euphemism for the latest puppy pictures from Aunt Rosie.

In fact, according to an internal Facebook study released in October, average referral traffic from the social media network to officially declared "media sites" has increased by over 170 percent over the past year. These included referral traffic to sites like TIME, BuzzFeed, and Bleacher Report, which increased an impressive 1081 percent in Facebook news postings over 2012.

Facebook has been working with 29 media sites testing how to increase referral traffic even more, by asking those media sites to post more frequently. The result was an 80 percent increase in referral traffic after those media sites increased the number of articles posted by about 50 percent.

Having (perhaps) convinced some media sites to raise the quantity of Facebook news posts, now Facebook is working to increase the "quality" of news-related posts found in users' news feeds. "Today's update to News Feed ranking recognizes that people want to see more relevant news and what their friends have to say about it," wrote Facebook's Varun Kacholia in the announcement.

For users, the update means they might find media links to news articles in their News Feed with more frequency, especially on Facebook's mobile platform. But for smaller media companies, it might mean getting shut out of more Facebook News Feeds: "Starting soon, we'll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently."

It makes sense that Facebook would want to keep the meme-related traffic on Facebook, what will BuzzFeed do? More seriously, the change raises questions about what constitutes a "high quality article" for Facebook. Will it use a pagerank system similar to Google? Will this put smaller news websites at a disadvantage, no matter the quality of their articles? For now, Facebook hasn't revealed any metrics it may be using to sort through the media morass.

A few other changes are taking affect in Facebook's News Feed, including a suggested "related articles" function. After you click a link on an article, writes Kacholia, "you may see up to three related articles directly below the News Feed Post to help you discover more content you may find interesting." Facebook's example includes one suggested article from the same source and another article from a big-name media company.

Facebook's changes are still in flux, and engineers are still responding to users' feedback as they go forward with News Feed tweaks. Earlier this year, Facebook enacted hashtags (a la Twitter) to make conversations in News Feeds more "public" and to bolster its news distribution cred.