Timelines are cool

I’ve been meaning to blog about a feature that Google has had simmering in the labs for a while.  The discovery of an interesting use of the Reuters search at Reuters.com brought it back to mind.

As many readers here know, I have big problems with the way the news media in the US tends to drop stuff from their news cycles, making it hard to follow a story or news event from start to finish.  In fact, that is one reason I blog.  I often go back and look at items tagged with "news media" and remind myself about what I considered important last month or last year.

To get a real view of an event, it helps to look at it over the long term and see when events happened in relation to other events.  This is key to grasping when an event is "out of the blue" and when it is a reaction to something that may not have made headlines.  Reuters makes this easy for you by using the terms CHRONOLOGY or RPT-CHRONOLOGY in the title of articles designed for this purpose.  Since both types of titles, you can just use CHRONOLOGY in your search at http://www.reuters.com. 

For example, if you wanted to look at the chain of events involving the militant attacks on the oil infrastructure in Nigeria you can search Reuters for CHRONOLOGY oil nigeria attacks and you will find this article:

    CHRONOLOGY-Nigerian militant attacks on oil industry

In which the attacks are summarized and keyed by date.  This gives you enough information to start looking for news coverage of each event if you want to dig deeper.

Google has started doing something similar with its search results by introducing in the experimental Timeline view.  This feature is very flakey on some searches, but you may find it useful for searches where there is a time factor to the information you have located.

If you search Google for Linux Adoption as a basic search you get about three-hundred and four thousand hits in an order that Google hs determined using their own criteria.  However, if you repeat that search for Linux Adoption and then add a space and view:timeline to the end of the search field you get the articles sorted and grouped by time.  At the top of the search results you get a nice timeline muxed with a bar graph so you can see the time period where most of the hits occur as shown below.

You can also fine tune the date range via the filter beside the timeline.  I’ve played with this feature and it seems to still need work.   As you can see in the timeline, 2007 has the most hits for the search term linux adoption but if you try to filter on 2006-2007 using the format given in the example, you get no results at all.  Hopefully this feature will be fixed and fine tuned in the future.

If you do use this feature, even jut to play around, please consider answering Google’s Feedback Survey and letting them know what you think.