Google Lifts Curtain On News Timeline

As the top aggregator on the Web, Google News already drives the daily media cycle in ways that are arguably detrimental to the health of enterprise journalism. Now, the Google juggernaut has set its sights on defining the historical news cycle with its pervasive algorithm, unveiling Google News Timeline, a zoomable, graphical chronology of all the stories, videos and photos that Google told us were important in the first place.
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The new search tool allows users to access "thousands of archival newspapers and magazines" in addition to headlines, quotes, photos and videos from Google News and YouTube, wrote software engineer Andy Hertzfeld Monday in a blog introducing Google News Timeline.

A product of Google Labs, Google News Timeline still appears to be in its infancy as a power tool. We spent a few minutes trying to break it and discovered that nobody in the wide world of media used the word "netbook" in a story prior to March 28, 2009. Another oddity was the inclusion of Time magazine cover images in the results of every single search we tried, including for "Newsweek."

"At Google, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to organize information," Hertzfeld wrote Monday. Apparently, Time was happy to spend something in return.

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BY Damon Poeter
Source：CM.com

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