SAN FRANCISCO: Google is giving the subjects of news stories a way to comment on articles written about them.

The online search leader introduced an experimental feature this week on its Google News Web site in the United States to allow any person mentioned in a news story that is linked there to submit a written response.

A Google employee then must verify the authenticity of the e-mail. Some methods include independently tracking down the subject's contact information and calling that person directly, or checking the author's e-mail address and phone number against information on a company or organization Web site.

If the author's identity is confirmed, the response is posted on the same page as the search results for the story.

The feature helps Google's news site evolve from being solely an aggregator of news articles to a forum where news subjects - and even the journalists who wrote the stories - can respond publicly to criticisms. The company emphasized that the feature is in the testing phase but could expand to other regions and languages.

Google pointed to several examples on the site Wednesday, including one from a McDonald's spokesman responding to a story about preschoolers preferring food wrapped in McDonald's packaging, and another from a professor at the University of California at San Francisco commenting on the importance of a new HIV treatment.

Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google, declined to say how many employees were working on the project or how many responses from news subjects the company has received so far. Google announced the feature Tuesday in a blog posting.

“It's still early, but we're encouraged by what we've seen thus far,” Stricker said.

The goal is to test the “hypothesis that - whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates - a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story,” Dan Meredith and Andy Golding, both software engineers at Google, said in the blog posting.

Google operates the Internet's largest ad network, but far fewer people visit its news site than the one offered by its chief search rival, Yahoo.