Google's Living Story format, aimed at giving users a more in-depth, interactive experience of
online news, is now freely available to outlets worldwide. It had been trialled in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post over the last two months.
According to the search giant, 75 per cent of people who gave feedback on the experiment said they preferred it to traditional online news articles.
Living Stories present users with a timeline of changes to a given story, including the latest updates and photos, previous articles and related background material, prompting comparisons with Wikipedia entries.
Santiago de la Mora, Google's print content partnerships director, explains that the format is part of his company's broader aim to find new methods of delivering and consuming news online.
"We look forward to working with developers and journalists to see how we can work together on Living Stories," he adds. "We're keen on finding new innovative ways for news publishers to deliver content and find online readers."
The idea behind the format is for users to search the news by topic, rather than story, with each topic possessing a consistent URL filled with ordered content.
These single web addresses become more relevant to search-engine algorithms in the process, enabling news providers to create more critical mass around a particular event or topic for search engines to spider.
