Google News Gets More Social

Malcolm Coles, a content strategy consultant at Digital Sparkle, noted yesterday on his personal blog, "Google seems to be experimenting with adding a 'Shared by -number-' stat next to Google News results - so you can see how popular each story is on Twitter etc."

Then Coles continued, "I'm seeing this even though I'm not logged in to my Google account. The people who shared it aren't people I follow on Twitter (not that Google should know this). And I see it only on the news box on the main web search results page."

It should be interesting to see if Google implements this feature on a permanent basis. It's easy to figure that news sites would be pleased to receive a lot more traffic as a result. And users may also approve, since the "shared by" indicators would lead them to interesting stories.

That, in turn, could also cause people to visit Google News more often, which would be a win for the search giant.

We'll see what happens and try to report any significant updates.