Google has embarked upon a pretty neat experiment with the New York Times and the Washington Post. The search giant has collaborated with two of the world’s top newspapers to try an experiment that creates what Google calls a “living URL” for news. It would consolidate the coverage of a news story, taking into account the reader details and providing appropriate information based on those details.
It sounds quite advanced, indeed. To understand this new experiment, first it is imperative we understand just what is a “living URL.” Google’s Marissa Mayer explained the concept a few months back. She said that the idea is that a particular news story lives at one single URL, and any updates to that story are published on that URL, rather than in a new story at a new URL. It makes sense, and it’s even similar to the Google Wave idea.
The Google Living Stories page is now live in Google Labs (check it out here). Google boasts about its experiment keeping on-going story coverage all in one place, “You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load,” says Google.
A living story features a summary at the top of each page to provide a story overview. This summary is rewritten as significant changes occur, with changes highlighted for the reader’s attention. Below this summary is a running catalogue of information related to the story, which is condensed for easy browsing. As can be expected, the newest information appears at the top of the news catalogue. Google also provides filters on the left side of the page, which allow readers to easily identify a story’s important moments, people involved, source materials, images, audio, and quotations. It certainly sounds like a useful tool for journalists and researchers.
For now, the stories have been selected by the New York Times, and the Washington Post, based on what they have already been reporting. The content will likely grow in the next few months, as the experiment gains in popularity.
One minor snag in the operation is that it’s not always possible to view the full article linked to on the living page. This is because, according to Search Engine Land’s query to Google Senior business product manager Josh Cohen, content partners are able to choose just how much information they are happy to show. This means that sometimes the article will only be a paragraph or two, and sometimes the reader will get the whole thing. There’s also no linking out of living stories pages to other news articles.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this exciting tool develops and (if it does) gain in popularity.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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