Google Labs Experimental Timeline & Map Views

[engine]

See results on a timeline or map. With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places.

[google.com...]

[tedster]

Not sure how I would use this, but it is interesting. Studying well-established but competing companies might be one area.

[Robert Charlton]

...Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results...

I've played with Timeline a bit. It's a fascinating experiment... impressive that it's as successful as it is. As might be expected, it's still quite literal. On some searches I've tried, eg, there are several levels of ambiguity. A placename turned out also to be a brandname, and both had histories. The searches have got the words down, but not (yet) the ambiguities.

I'd bet that date points are derived in much the same manner as news points on Google Trends... and it appears that there's some dynamic determination of threshold values with regard to dates on the timeline. What this appears to do on subjects with lots of recent history is to obscure the display of the old history... whereas on subjects with not much recent history, the old (or even ancient) history is also displayed.

I like the idea of multi-dimensional search a lot, and I've long been expecting a further mashup... a continuously variable timeline on Google Earth for various data layers. This is a small and promising step in that direction.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:43 am (utc) on May 25, 2007]

[decaff]

The drill down in the timeline is very cool...
you can really get to some granular information..

This will surely be a helpful look at information for
many forms of historical research (political, social, business...etc..)

[tedster]

A new Google Patent application for Displaying Facts on a Linear Graph [appft1.uspto.gov] seems to be tailored made for this developing Timeline [google.com] app:

Some facts explicitly describe the positions in the linear order, while are facts do not explicitly describe the positions. The facts are presented in the order on a linear graph, such as a timeline. Facts of the objects describing geographic positions are presented on a map.

The process has several features that are designed to clean up discrepancies in the data collected from original documents.