Google News Is Testing A Comments Feature

By Amit Chowdhry ● Aug 8, 2007

Yesterday on Google’s corporate blog, Dan Meredith and Andy Golding — both software engineers on the Google News Team — wrote about an experimental feature. The new experimental feature is that comments will now start showing up on Google News stories.

These comments are only published by a select group of readers. The long-term strategy of this feature is to allow all participants to comment.

“As always, Google News will direct readers to the professionally-written articles and news sources our algorithms have determined are relevant for a topic,” wrote Meredith and Golding. “From bloggers to mainstream journalists, the journalists who help create the news we read every day occupy a critical place in the information age.”

For now, Google News is testing out this feature in the U.S. and then the comments will start branching out to other countries. It would be interesting to see comments in native languages.

For example, imagine if in India, a user can comment in Hindi, then Google News India will have the comment in India right besides the translation of the comment.

This is definitely an exciting feature for Google News. It makes the site more interactive, Digg-like, and will provides different perspectives on issues.