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New Google News Timeline Makes News

by Chad Mumm on April 21, 2009 at 12:41 PM

Google Labs is Google's experimental playground for new programs, and, thanks to the company's fabled '20-percent time' (employees are encouraged to spend 20-percent of their time creating new projects and brainstorming new ideas), there is always plenty of innovation to be found. Some of our favorite Google products -- Google Maps, GOOG-411, Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Video and iGoogle -- had their humble beginnings in Google Labs. Now, the mad geniuses in Mountain View have introduced the latest search function we never knew we wanted: Google News Timeline.

As its name implies, Google News Timeline allows you to view and sort top news headlines on a horizontal timeline. You can scroll down to find more stories from a given day, or scroll sideways to move forward or backward chronologically. You can search, of course, and you can then sort the results by day, week, month, year or decade -- useful for easily seeing how a story or event has progressed in the news. In typical Google fashion, the viewer is ultra-organized and doesn't offer much in the way of flashy design (although, if you think there's no room for flashiness in news, then check out Rayogram).

It should be noted that the project is still experimental, meaning that all of its bugs haven't been worked out just yet. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld notes in his review that he had trouble changing between time ranges and search terms, and also laments the lack of the "by the hour or the minute" option that makes Twitter Search so useful. Since the project is still in Labs, we'd bet on this stuff getting worked out. It will be interesting to see Google's inevitable answer to Twitter's real-time search capability. Meanwhile, hop on over to Google Labs and give the News Timeline a try for yourself. Let us know what you think. [From: Google Blog, Via: Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, google, google labs, google news, google news timeline, GoogleLabs, GoogleNews, GoogleNewsTimeline, new, news, top

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