What Is the Google News Timeline?

On Monday, April 20th, 2009, popular search engine and email provider Google released an experimental product called Google News Timeline that allows users to view news and other related search results from the Google servers on an “interactive timeline”. The idea behind Good News Timeline is to offer new and more engaging possibilities for users looking to explore news or media stories, especially older information that is often difficult to find in newspaper, magazine, and other periodical archives. Google News Timeline is also described as “a powerful way to view trends in culture and society or the careers of famous people” by its creators at Google.

Andy Hertzfeld’s Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline, which you can find in the much loved “Labs” section of Google’s main page is the latest invention of Andy Hertzfeld — best known as one of the original designers of the first Macintosh home computers. According to Mr. Hertzfeld, Google News Timeline is  ” . . . a visual map of what’s going on in the world.” Mr. Hertzfeld made this statement during a presentation of the new Google service at Google’s San Francisco offices on April 20th. The “Labs” section of Google is reserved for the presentation of new and experimental products created by Google employees.

In his lighting fast Google News Timeline presentation, Mr. Hertzfeld showed off the Timeline’s ability to quickly display information — specifically, Hertzfeld searched for and displayed every recent book review that ran in The New York Times, career highlights of Bob Dylan and director Steven Spielberg, a huge Timeline of information on every Nobel Laureate winner in the field of physics, and ended his presentation with the most impressive display of the Google Timeline in my opinion: a picture laden display on the “evolution” of the covers of Popular Science magazine, showing how the magazine moved from a concentration on military technology at the magazine’s beginning, and moving into more recent Popular Science covers’ concentration on transportation and space exploration, which have become more prominent in recent years. This last presentation displayed Google Timeline’s truly innovative searching “muscles” — to gather those covers and display them in a single location would normally take either hours of searching, formatting, and posting, or a small band of extremely web-savvy individuals. Now, this information is right at Google users’ fingertips, using the new Google Timeline feature.

Interesting side note — Google does not expect to immediately make money from the service, but Mr. Hertzfeld alluded to the fact that over time Google may decide to place ads on Google News Timeline pages.

How Google News Timeline Works

So what does Google Timeline look like? The main page displays “top stories” divided by columns, with each vertical column representing a day of the week in history. Much like using Google Maps, users of Google TImeline can “drag” the news results left and right or “in and out”. This allows uers to see different days or to zoom in on individual stories within a single day. Users can also change the Timeline intervals to a setting of “weekly, monthly or yearly”. One of the puzzling features of the main Google News Timeline page is that it includes Time magazine covers exclusively — it would have been nice if Google could have worked out a deal with a few other magazine, as people tend to like to get their news from multiple sources. Still, the presentation of Time magazine covers will allow users to quickly scan through world events over the years as presented by Time.

When users decide to utilize the Google Timeline for their regular everyday web searches, Google News Timeline shows off a more interesting side of itself. The Timeline service instantly includes current stories gathered by Google News, as well as archived news information, scanned images form major newspapers, blogger posts, scores from major sporting events, quotes from magazines and books, and even information gathered from media like music, television, and films. Users of the Google Timeline can search specific categories, like news, news photos, news quotes, blogs, TV shows, and a wide array of specific search features such as internation prizes like the Pulitzer and Nobel. On a blog post describing the product, Google suggests a variety of popular searches that users can “test” the Timeline service with — specifically, Google suggest searches of “Jack Nicholson movies,” “Barack Obama quotes,” and “baseball news photos.” I must admit — I performed the Barack Obama quote search and was amazed at the vast amount of information that popped up, easily viewable and very relevant to the search topic.

Other Applications for the Google Timeline

In his presentation, Google Timeline creator Hertzfeld suggested that the Google Timeline program’s capabilities may be useful for other types of searches: “What is a zoomable timeline useful for? We are just scratching the surface,” he said. Mr. Hertzfeld implied that he didn’t think the timeline interface would be useful for generic Web searches. He tried to include a design feature that would make everyday web searching easier, but because many Web pages that generic web searches depend on don’t include an obvious “time element to them” the way that news stories do, the results he found were not very useful, and this part of the experiment was ultimately scrapped.

Google is well known for announcing unique and experimental projects — many of which turn into useful products or features that web users have since incorporated into their everyday lives. The popular email service Gmail started out as one of these experiments, and is now arguably the email server with the biggest buzz. Many others Google “Labs” projects have fallen apart or disappeared over time — this is why the announcement of Google Timeline was coupled with a revamping of the Google Labs service — an attempt to make the Labs more visible and easier for users to try out the new services and also to provide feedback to the products’ creators. According to Google, the overall goal of “Labs” is to “close the gap between a new idea and the time it takes to get it to our users.”

It is not clear whether the new Google News Timeline product will further strain relationships between Google and other mainstream news organizations. Google has been under fire by many news sources over Google’s regular use of other companies news content in their Google News feature. The Timeline doesn’t dig up new content created by news organizations — a sign that Google is growing sympathetic to these news outlet’s claims — instead, Google News Timeline simply offers a new way for users to search news stories that have already been indexed by Google News, as well as magazine and newspaper archives that Google has licensed ahead of time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under Internet, News, Technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.