Google Joins Forces With Newspapers For 'Living Stories' Feature

Google joins forces with newspapers for 'Living Stories' feature

Collaboration with New York Times and Washington Post signals a new phase in search enginge's attitude to news

Living Stories allows to filter the news around a topic in various ways

Together with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google is introducing an experimental way of presenting news online. Using certain advantages of online publishing Living Stories organises information according to how stories are developing.

It suggests Google is entering a phase in which it is actively engaging with news organisations – by developing tools for them, for example. "We're looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organisations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features," write software engineer Neha Singh and senior business project manager Josh Cohen on the Google blog.

The Living Story feature – which works in a similar fashion to topic pages – groups content around a keywords such as "climate change" or "the war in Afghanistan".

Binding it together using a story summary, the experiment prioritises content according to how important it is and displays it in different ways. Each topic comes with a visual timeline and a list of important events, and the option of filtering topics - in "the war in Afghanistan", for example, the reader can focus on "the troop debate" or "the Afghanistan elections".

-- Agencies 2009-12-09