Google reshapes the way we organize searching for news.

Posted on April 22, 2009

Google has re-imagined the way we organize and search for news on their new Google News Timeline. Now before we get too carried away this new method of searching is still located within the realm of Google Labs.

"Google Labs is a website demonstrating new Google projects "that aren't quite ready for prime time". It serves as a testing ground for new services being developed. This is a way for Google to gain feedback on the products before releasing the final versions. Google's services do not always appear on the Labs page; some are beta tested by invitation-only, like Gmail and Google Calendar once were." ~definition provided by Wikipedia

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

The Timeline interface pulls from a large variety of sources including the following: News Sources, Magazines and Newspapers, Blogs, Baseball Scores, Wikipedia Events, Media from Freebase, Births, and Deaths. All in all it seems to be a fairly comprehensive news gathering source with a new hip visual interface. However there are some drawbacks of an unfamiliar navigation system, and this may take a while to catch on. I believe Google is taking this development more seriously as touch screen computing becomes more common place. This organization of information would be much easier to navigate with touch screens than the current organization of headlines and brief descriptions.

Here's a little preview of what the news browsing system looks like: