Still in development:
Google Living Stories
Google Unveils News-by-Topic Service
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
New York Times
Published: December 8, 2009
Google on Tuesday unveiled a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment was successful, it would be made available to all publishers.
The announcement of the “living stories” project offers an example of Google’s collaboration with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat to their troubled businesses, and when Google has taken a steps to project an image of being a friend to the industry.
Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do, grouping articles and other material by subject matter. In the case of The Times, the paper’s Web site already has thousands of “topic pages.” But those efforts have not yielded heavy reader traffic or much advertising.
The Google project is now at livingstories.googlelabs.com, part of Google Labs, where the company tries out experimental products, but if it is judged a success, it would eventually reside on the site of any publisher that wanted to use it.
“It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company. “I think in it you can see the germ of something quite interesting.”
Google’s dominant search engine sells ads alongside search results that often include news articles, leading some newspaper industry leaders — particularly executives of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — to cry foul. Other publishers say that, on the contrary, they owe much of their Internet traffic — and the resulting revenue, limited though it may be — to search engines.
Google executives have long argued that the tools their company has developed, including search, make them the papers’ ally, a case made by Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, in an opinion piece published last week in The Wall Street Journal.
Also last week, Google announced some changes in the way its search function interacted with news sites, giving publishers more flexibility in blocking access to their sites, or in setting limits on how much material a reader could see before encountering a demand for payment or registration. The changes were relatively minor, but reinforced the message that the company wanted to help news sites.
On the living stories project, Google worked for months with The Times and The Post, consulting not only with the papers’ engineers and Web producers, but also with editors and reporters. For now, it covers just eight broad topics, like health care reform or the Washington Redskins.
At the top of the page for a given subject is a summary, a timeline of major events and some pictures, followed by the opening sections of a series of articles, in reverse chronological order.
A set of buttons allows the reader to narrow the topic by several criteria, including one that presents only images. One of the more appealing features is that a reader can call up the entirety of an article without navigating away from that subject page, reading one piece after another without using the “forward” and “back” buttons.
In various ways, the experiment duplicates, expands or improves on what can now be done on publishers’ own sites, through a search engine’s news function, or even on Wikipedia. Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers to embed in their sites, much as those publishers can now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites.
“I think we would expect that different publishers would take it in a number of different directions,” he said.
nytimes.com |
