Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline, which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search)
The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in.
You can also switch the calendar to view stories by day, week, month, year, or decade. But why not by the hour or the minute? That is where Google news is weakest and losing out to Twitter search, in my opinion. Finally, to put a finer filter on it, you can search only news quotes, news videos, blogs, magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, or various other sources. Maybe it could add a bias filter.
The idea is a good one, but this is very obviously a Google Labs project. Switching from year to decade, back to day is not seamless.Going from decade to day, for instance, doesn’t bring me back to the present, but to 2003. Similarly, it seems like it has trouble switching from search term to search term. This might be simply because it just launched, but I am hoping Google resolves these issues quickly so I can test it as a research tool. I often find myself looking for articles from the past, and seeing stories laid out on an actual timeline is visually helpful. It would also be nice if you could merge different sources, so that you could search across blogs and news at the same time, for instance.
i never used google news and i doubt i ever will.
Good news from Goog news. I am a longtime user of this, i use it as search of specific locations/city, not as homepage/timeline.
New feature i would love in goog news would be …. donno yet
I think this is a great idea – one of the problems Google search still has is dealing with the age of content. Sometimes you want only new content, sometimes only old, and this is a good step in that direction. I imagine this way of browsing information would also be very useful for historians/journalists to go back and dissect how things happen.
Yes, as you say, this is a new direction in filtering content based on age or time period from the last update. Google’s next target should be just that I think.
Is this Scoble’s embargoe’d news for 4pm PST?
Jesse: no.
Dang – now I really want to know what’s at 4pm.
Jesse: you can watch live!
Robert, I’ll be there, of course
too many websites on the world
This tool would be extraordinarily useful for the social studies or language arts classroom. For, just as you would like to use this kind of a tool to conduct your research, students are learning to conduct research. Perhaps some foundation would be interested in underwriting curriculum development using this tool as a central resource for student learning.
http://www.less...ch.blogspot.com
Do you think this Google Timeline is too general in terms of content? I mean can people really find what they are looking for in Google Timeline. I think it can be too general. In other words, I mean I really don’t care about anything that happened a year ago per se on all topics. Is there are better way to improve Google Timeline personally?
Real-time search is amongst the hot topics these days. And I guess that’s the next wave and will define Web 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever. In my opinion, one company that’s doing it’s best in this space is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web in real time based on how popular they are in Twitter. That’s a classic idea and I believe this company can make it big.
Why is Boing Boing put in as a favoured blog?
Nice timeline view of the news.
Have you seen hookk? It tracks citizen reactions to the news in a sidebar next to the news item.
It’s kinda like an unauthorized commenting site except a hookk can be no longer than 120 characters and is generally the subtext to an article.
The interesting thing is that it has been launched “sea worthy” as the founder puts it. So you can follow them on twitter to see the site being built as it is being used.
Worth checking out. http://hookk.com – http://twitter.com/hookk
You can already do this on a site called Clipta. http://news.clipta.com
I think this feature is extremely useful. However, as a video news tool, it lacks certain characteristics that many users could benefit from. The most obvious being the lack of video news content. Also, if I wanted to watch news by topic, without having to manually input a search keyword, I have to spent a long time browsing.
Check out Clipta News platform (http://news.clipta.com), I think this is a more effective way of delivering video news.
Google is known for its innovations. Let’s try this one
This is so cool. It’s so often that because we’re so determined about our future that we forget what brought us here. This was very smart of Google to bring this in as a way to remind ourselves of how we’ve become today……. Don’t think I’ll be using it though.
I’m definitely going to find this useful.
At first glance I would say Newsmap by Marcos Weskamp is a far superior tool. It looks better and has all the functionality one could ask for. I have no connection to the site, just always thought it was very well designed.
Take a look.
http://marumush...map/newsmap.cfm
Newsmap is great. I used to have it as my homepage… but it lacks a search option, unlike Google News Timeline
NVM da past. Onto the future, POTNA!
LOL
Love Google News Timeline… if I needed real-time, I would stick to Twitter search. Speaking of which, I did a keyword search for ‘Twitter’ and got an immediate overview of the buzz around it.
Great for doing quick market research.
Interesting development although nothing really ground breaking, we want to know about the future Google via a prediction/probability timeline…
Minority Report FTW
its different way of presenting news timeline and expectations are more in future
I think it is a great idea sometimes you want only new content, sometimes only old, and this is a good step in that direction.