Google News Timeline Offers Powerful Search Options

Apr 20, 2009 at 5:23pm ET by Matt McGee

In addition to the new similar image search, Google has also announced the addition of Google News Timeline as a Google Labs experimental service.

Google News Timeline is what it sounds like — a tool that lets you see news coverage over a period of time. A search for “somali pirates” showing weekly coverage looks like this:

But it’s also more than a simple news timeline, because Google has added a number of user controls that lets you customize the tool in several different ways. You can:

choose from a variety of news types, such as newspapers, magazines, blogs, videos, images, and more
see content from multiple sources at the same time
see daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or even a decade-by-decade timeline for your query
change the display size to see more or less results
include or avoid content from data sources like Wikipedia and TIME magazine, or certain newspapers and blogs

On the flip side, I’m seeing something I’d like to be fixed or added — when trying to include Seattle newspapers in my search, the West Seattle Herald is the only option available. No Seattle Times and no Seattle P-I; I don’t know if that’s a bug, or if that content is simply unavailable. It would be interesting to be able to see a timeline of Microsoft news, for example, from the primary Seattle newspapers. (The Seattle P-I recently shut down, however.)

This is a Google Labs service so bugs and improvements are to be expected, but the Google News Timeline is already a very powerful research tool.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

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