Google News Over Time

Yesterday, the smart fellers over at Google (GOOG) unveiled two new nifty services in Google Labs, the online space where interesting tools in beta mode can be tested by the public. The first out of the gate was a new twist on Google's image search function. Heretofore, search terms that have multiple meanings brought you completely unrelated images, with no way to cull the images you didn't want to look at. Now, each image has a special link, in which you can pull up all the images that resemble it, discarding the rest. It's interesting enough, but not quite fireworks.

Google News Timeline, however, is another story. Now, Google will arrange news along a graphic chronology, displaying all the most important news of the day in a single vertical bar. Moving along to the left, readers will be able to see the most significant news of the day before, the day after that, and so on. If you search for a specific term, Google will give you news results for that term on the same timeline, stretching back year by year. Now you can trace the career of Barack Obama along a timeline, or watch cultural, scientific, and political trends as they develop. The results will draw on recent headlines indexed by Google News, archived newspaper and magazines that Google has signed licenses to display, blog posts, digital books, you name it. If you go back in history far enough, the service will pull Wikipedia entries as far back as the fifteenth century.

It's a great tool, and a seductive timewaster. But New York Times scribe Miguel Helft wonders if it will prove to be another headache for the company's legal department. "It is not clear whether the product will further intensify tensions between Google and news organizations over the company’s use of news content in Google News," he writes.

In addition, PC World writer Edward Albro thinks the company may have slapped a few too many tricks onto the site, overwhelming casual users. "News timeline also suffers from some over-engineering," he writes. "There [are] drop-down menus, search fields, date fields, fields for tweaking the display, and ways of rearranging the information by dragging around content sources. ... [B]efore timeline is ready for the general public it'll have to be simpler and more straightforward. But that's the way Google labs projects are supposed to be: Intriguing, but not fully baked."

But there's no end to the merriment you can have with this. For example, try searching for "teabagging." For years, all you'll see is praise for a tasty, invigorating beverage. Sometime around 2002, a slightly less caffeinated meaning starts to filter into the country. Then along comes April 2009, and suddenly you can't talk about tax policy without a scrotum hitting you in the face. Too much fun. Gentlemen, start your engines.