Google News is set to add a feature which will allow the people covered in its stories to add their own comments to the news page.The new facility is intended to enhance readers' experience and to enable fuller reporting of news items.
Software engineers for the search engine Andy Golding and Dan Meredith commented: "Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments and we'll show them next to the articles about the story."
The mechanism allowing comments to be added will only be available to a subset of readers, namely those individuals and organisations who actually feature in the news content.
"Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as 'comments' so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report," the engineers add.
Under the new system, people searching for news will be directed to professionally written articles and other sources detected by Google algorithms. However, readers will also be able to access the personal viewpoint of those involved.
The search engine is trialling the new feature in the US initially and, if it proves successful, will expand it to other editions and languages.
In June of this year Google's news search site recorded 9.28 million unique visitors, while Yahoo!'s news site had an impressive 35.2 million, according to comScore Media Metrix.
