I’ve covered graphical search engines a few times, and mentioned my favorite one: Viewzi. When done right, these sites can deliver much better ways to sift through a lot of results than a typical Google results page. However, that’s not to say that Google isn’t on the case. While it’s not exactly a “graphical” search engine like Viewzi is, I’m finding News Timeline, a brand new way to search from Google itself, very useful.

News Timeline is one of the regular search experiments that come out of Google Labs. What it does is show you news stories in a timeline view, with a choice of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or even decade-centric views. For bloggers and any other folks working in web publishing, it’s an excellent way to follow important stories over time.
For example, Windows 7 is a big tech news story at the moment. In the screenshot above, I have searched for “Windows 7,” specifying that I want daily views of news stories on it, and I want them to show up at a “Small” setting so that I can scan large collections of stories at once. The screenshot shows a portion of the results I get back, where you can see the dates for the past few days up top, and Windows 7 stories written from various angles showing up each day. You can use sliders and scroll tools in News Timeline to move around the tapestries of stories that you see.
As another example of how News Timeline can be useful, let’s say you were doing a story on Oracle’s intent to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. If you set News Timeline to its “Decade” view, and search for “Oracle Corp. acquisition,” you’ll quickly go to many news stories on the large number of acquisitions the database giant has made over the last 20 years. Doing this, I quickly found the terms involved in Oracle’s big acquisition of PeopleSoft from several years ago, and details on lots of the company’s other acquisitions.
Sometimes when I navigate through a News Timeline result, I somehow seem to get stuck in previous decades, but I can quickly return to the present day by typing today’s date in. Other than that minor quibble, News Timeline is very handy for anyone who writes online.
What are you using News Timeline for?
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2009\/04\/22\/googles-news-timeline-is-useful-for-bloggers-and-writers\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_259a0fe2acd9d024c6a89bb85f27fbed","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}